4 ms·

Anyone up for guessing how much the AWS bill would be for this specific application? I'm guessing it's less than $100/month.

mike_d 5y ago
Any AWS product at scale gets real expensive real quick. A general rule of thumb is CloudFront is $2500/mo for every 100 Mbps of traffic you have, not counting origin or per request fees. I would expect they are pushing multiple Gbps with every household in the US trying to order tests.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Can you re-state the cost in terms of F-35 fighter jets?
  - throwanem 5y ago
    About 3.1 Tbps per aircraft, if we generously assume the $78M flyaway cost is accurate.
- daveevad 5y ago
  I had missed the CloudFront part, once I saw Akamai my mind must have skipped it.
- count 5y ago
  They're probably not pushing even hundreds of Mbps - it's a 2MB site in total, and almost all of it is static, and will be cached by various proxies/etc. They might PEAK at a Gbps for the first few hours, and then fall off to a long tail of basically nothing. It's just not big - no serious images, no video, etc. And it's US only, not global. And most people will only hit the site one time, order and it's done. And even so, $2500/mo is 'free': just the paperwork to put the money on contract to the provider probably costs more than that by an order of magnitude.
holler 5y ago
For comparison I'm running a low traffic discussion site (https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im) with core api through ApiGateway/Lambda w/lots of backend services and it's currently ~$400/month. The most expensive piece by FAR is Opensearch (previously AWS Elasticsearch) using 6 instances x 2 environments (12 total). The cost for Elasticsearch in two environments came to ~$371 out of a total $400 bill in my last statement. The compute cost for Lambda is very low but if you scale out to potentially millions of users it's going to be much more than $100. Not sure if they're using Opensearch but if they are it's likely a huge part of the bill. I'm sure there's a better alternative but it's not my particular area of expertise and I haven't been able to focus on that yet.
- daibo 5y ago
  Are you using Opensearch for logging or site search? $371 seems like a lot for a low traffic site. You can probably reduce the cost to a fraction by doing some research on alternatives
  - holler 5y ago
    It's largely due to the homepage loading a ranked list of items from ES on every request, but I'm probably not optimizing things properly either. I saw your comment about anvere and looks like you have a background in search/ES? I'd be interested to chat but didn't see a way to contact you!
    - daibo 5y ago
      Hey, send me an email to linh at anvere.net. Or twitter dm @linh_at_anvere edit: anvere is a Search as a Service that I am currently building
  - 8192kjshad09- 5y ago
    Yeah if your low traffic site doesn't need any crazy compute you can probably run it for $5/mo on any commodity VPS provider like Linode or DigitialOcean
- nso 5y ago
thamer 5y ago
Chrome Dev tools says 2,615,081 bytes loaded in 67 requests for the first 2 pages (home page + form). Some of it is on Akamai as the article describes, but if we had everything on CloudFront and wanted to estimate the cost of 1M orders: 2.38 TiB out + (say) 1 KiB/request * 67M or 67 GiB in: that's $275.50 per 1 million orders (approximately $207 out + $67 in + $1 requests cost). If we add 1M Lambda executions, we still get $0 since that's the entire free tier. 10M Lambda calls at 50 ms each and 128 MB of RAM cost $1.8, so that's pretty much free as well. Assuming that CloudFront caching is configured correctly, there would be very few requests to the S3 origin so their cost would be negligible. Someone please correct me if I've got this completely wrong. Source: https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ (CF: 2.38 TB + 67 GB + 67M req).
- daveevad 5y ago
  $275.50 per 1 million orders There will be 420 million orders according to sources online, which gets us to $115,710. Very interesting - thank you for the analysis.
  - rdubs333 5y ago
    I filed a FOIA request to GSA to see how much they spent on the website to build it and any third parties used. They referred me to the FDA, guessing they paid for it.
    - daveevad 5y ago
      That's awesome - how did you go about FOIA-ing things? I've always wanted to know more about how to do that.
      - rdubs333 5y ago
        Its fairly easy actually but you have to be specific or they will charge you $$. So long as you arent wanting like the nuke codes or the location of Hoffa, they are helpful. Last one I did took a few months and I got a big packet in the mail. Cost me $10 or $20 I think.

mike_d 5y ago

Any AWS product at scale gets real expensive real quick. A general rule of thumb is CloudFront is $2500/mo for every 100 Mbps of traffic you have, not counting origin or per request fees. I would expect they are pushing multiple Gbps with every household in the US trying to order tests.

Tempest1981 5y ago
Can you re-state the cost in terms of F-35 fighter jets?
- throwanem 5y ago
  About 3.1 Tbps per aircraft, if we generously assume the $78M flyaway cost is accurate.
daveevad 5y ago
I had missed the CloudFront part, once I saw Akamai my mind must have skipped it.
count 5y ago
They're probably not pushing even hundreds of Mbps - it's a 2MB site in total, and almost all of it is static, and will be cached by various proxies/etc. They might PEAK at a Gbps for the first few hours, and then fall off to a long tail of basically nothing. It's just not big - no serious images, no video, etc. And it's US only, not global. And most people will only hit the site one time, order and it's done. And even so, $2500/mo is 'free': just the paperwork to put the money on contract to the provider probably costs more than that by an order of magnitude.

holler 5y ago

For comparison I'm running a low traffic discussion site (https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im) with core api through ApiGateway/Lambda w/lots of backend services and it's currently ~$400/month. The most expensive piece by FAR is Opensearch (previously AWS Elasticsearch) using 6 instances x 2 environments (12 total). The cost for Elasticsearch in two environments came to ~$371 out of a total $400 bill in my last statement. The compute cost for Lambda is very low but if you scale out to potentially millions of users it's going to be much more than $100. Not sure if they're using Opensearch but if they are it's likely a huge part of the bill. I'm sure there's a better alternative but it's not my particular area of expertise and I haven't been able to focus on that yet.

daibo 5y ago
Are you using Opensearch for logging or site search? $371 seems like a lot for a low traffic site. You can probably reduce the cost to a fraction by doing some research on alternatives
- holler 5y ago
  It's largely due to the homepage loading a ranked list of items from ES on every request, but I'm probably not optimizing things properly either. I saw your comment about anvere and looks like you have a background in search/ES? I'd be interested to chat but didn't see a way to contact you!
  - daibo 5y ago
    Hey, send me an email to linh at anvere.net. Or twitter dm @linh_at_anvere edit: anvere is a Search as a Service that I am currently building
- 8192kjshad09- 5y ago
  Yeah if your low traffic site doesn't need any crazy compute you can probably run it for $5/mo on any commodity VPS provider like Linode or DigitialOcean
nso 5y ago

thamer 5y ago

Chrome Dev tools says 2,615,081 bytes loaded in 67 requests for the first 2 pages (home page + form). Some of it is on Akamai as the article describes, but if we had everything on CloudFront and wanted to estimate the cost of 1M orders: 2.38 TiB out + (say) 1 KiB/request * 67M or 67 GiB in: that's $275.50 per 1 million orders (approximately $207 out + $67 in + $1 requests cost). If we add 1M Lambda executions, we still get $0 since that's the entire free tier. 10M Lambda calls at 50 ms each and 128 MB of RAM cost $1.8, so that's pretty much free as well. Assuming that CloudFront caching is configured correctly, there would be very few requests to the S3 origin so their cost would be negligible. Someone please correct me if I've got this completely wrong. Source: https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ (CF: 2.38 TB + 67 GB + 67M req).

daveevad 5y ago
$275.50 per 1 million orders There will be 420 million orders according to sources online, which gets us to $115,710. Very interesting - thank you for the analysis.
- rdubs333 5y ago
  I filed a FOIA request to GSA to see how much they spent on the website to build it and any third parties used. They referred me to the FDA, guessing they paid for it.
  - daveevad 5y ago
    That's awesome - how did you go about FOIA-ing things? I've always wanted to know more about how to do that.
    - rdubs333 5y ago
      Its fairly easy actually but you have to be specific or they will charge you $$. So long as you arent wanting like the nuke codes or the location of Hoffa, they are helpful. Last one I did took a few months and I got a big packet in the mail. Cost me $10 or $20 I think.