7 ms·

Deployed few services on ecs, nat gateway, shared elb, certificate and route53. Total cost 30$ per day ~900$ per month. You can accomplish the same for a frac

by pojzon 5y ago

Deployed few services on ecs, nat gateway, shared elb, certificate and route53. Total cost 30$ per day ~900$ per month. You can accomplish the same for a fraction of that cost. The convenience you talk about comes with a huge bill. If I add reserved instances/savings plan, probably gonna drop to 600-700$, but still… I can setup that myself on my local lab for around 5$ per month. So the knowledge required to setup that and hardware is worth around 695$ per month. Thats why Cloud Providers are biggest employers of old sysadmins ;)

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
This is true, but I will argue again that I am proficient enough with AWS to deploy a full stack with 10+ lambdas, DNS, certs, RDS, step functions, etc for < 5 dollars a month. You need to understand what to use and what not to. Most of that bill is from the nat gateway/private VPC, which you really dont need
- freedomben 5y ago
  RDS for < 5 dollars a month?
- mitjam 5y ago
  How? Last time I looked the smallest RDS for MySQL came at 11 USD.
douglasisshiny 5y ago
>Deployed few services on ecs, nat gateway, shared elb, certificate and route53. >Total cost 30$ per day ~900$ per month. Ummm... I think you're doing something incorrectly. The biggest line items on that list are ELB (assuming you mean Application Load Balancer/ALB) and NAT Gateway. But with that setup, I could maybe imagine $100/month with on-demand plans. Not $900.
- hayd 5y ago
  NAT is $1/day and ELB is 60cents/day. So those can't (although those costs excludes data transfer...) be the biggest line items.
  - Aea 5y ago
    NAT is $1/day *PER* AZ *PER* VPC. Managed NAT Gateways can be a very substantial cost depending on your architecture. I believe the recommended VPC layout has 3 AZs so you're paying close to $100/month for a single VPC just for NAT.
    - pojzon 5y ago
      Ding ding ding, ppl here dont take to account HA and disaster preventions you sometimes have to abaid to due to security certifications and regulations!
      - hayd 5y ago
        So your comparison with your $5 local lab is not just less "convenient"! Do you really need multi-multi-region failover redundancy? Do you really need multiple NATs in every region (it's easy to share one NAT Gateway across AZs, especially so if a region is only servicing DR)? Your numbers still sound high. x $1 + y $0.60 to make up $30 is a _lot_ of regions/AZs.
        rstupek 5y ago
        Yes the $5/month lab setup compared to a globally redundant service.
- jcims 5y ago
  How can you say that with ECS on the list? You have no idea how much compute is being used.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    Well he said he can replicate it with a $5/mo setup elsewhere. How much compute can you rent anywhere for $5/mo? How much compute can you get even buying the hardware and amortizing over its useful lifespan for $5/mo (~$300 total)?
    - justinclift 5y ago
      Reading over the post, it says $5 in their "local lab". Which probably means using existing or older hardware, so the $5 is probably electricity costs or similar. And it sounded more like a generalisation anyway. ;)
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  ECS can get up there if you're backing with large ec2 instances or something either way my biggest problem with services like AWS isn't really cost but that you end up using all of their SDKs and services out of convenicance and it becomes hard to track down or move away from.. it spiders out of control so fast that sometimes its better to spend an extra few weeks doing things the harder way that's not always an issue though espcially for startups
ramraj07 5y ago
what exactly do you set up for 5 bucks a month on your local lab? Sounds more like you’re comparing what lightsail offers, which incidentally costs the same even on aws? If you want a simple sight with just core aws, you can set one up on aws on elastic beanstalk for a few bucks a month. Add an rds for 15 a month. Why will you needlessly overcomplicate the system and then cry foul?
- pojzon 5y ago
  Tbh 5$ was to just show the order of magnitude. Even if it was 50$ per month, its still alot cheaper. And the cluster we are talking here about is a raspberry box with 10 mashines each 2cpu 8gb, running k8s, replicated storage, my own domain and certificate, metalb load balancers, and few other things. Its not as redundant as AWS, but it never broke in few years of constant work. Chances of all of those machines to break at the same time are astronomically low in normal circumstances. If I spread the cost of that setup over two years of reservation, the monthly cost will be a lot less than 50$.
_pdp_ 5y ago
We have around 20 API GW, at least 20 dynamodb tables and more than 30 lambdas, several queues and opensearch replicated across 2 environments (dev and prod) plus additional programming environments (cloud9) and we barely come close to half of what you you are budgeting here for. Your math is wrong.
- pojzon 5y ago
  How big are those Opensearch clusters ? Lets take a small production cluster of 4x r6g.large (default proposal for prod) (0.167$/h) deployed in VPC in private subnet (x2 for HA) That’s 16$ per day for instances only and 2.5$ per day for nat-gateways per day. So 18.5$ per day and ~550$ per month. Thats ofcourse if you disable all metrics all logs all alerting etc and it does not include Volumes cost, because its highly dependent on the domain. AWS is expensive because you get alot of administrative work out of the box (snapshots, restores, etc). Tho sometimes have to still fix in the source. Ive personally pushed quite a few fixes to OpenSearch source, coz version 1.0.0 had a lot of issues.
oneplane 5y ago
Is it really the same, or 'similar, but worse'? AWS is expensive, but multi-zone redundancy is expensive anywhere and even worse: it's not available everywhere. That also means that a side-project that doesn't need that redundancy would be a mismatch in terms of requirements anyway. On the other hand, if you need a multi zone automatically available system, you're running out of choices really fast.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Based upon outages when a single AWS zone goes offline, a whole hell of a lot more than side projects aren't taking advantage of multi-zone redundancy. I think what many fail to realize is that - surprise surprise! It isn't that simple. Many think "if my zone goes out, I'll just migrate to a different zone!" Nope! AWS doesn't have the capacity for it - as we've seen many times, AWS can't seem to handle the migratory load when a zone goes out. Sure, the other zones don't really die, but good luck migrating your workload to them. But when touting multi zones, no one ever mentions this little nugget of information.
  - pojzon 5y ago
    At my previous work we often were able to saturate all similar instance types in given region.. All AWS had to say was “we are working hard on providing additional capacity”. The same often happens on black friday, where companies scale up their platforms just in case because there might be no capacity on AWS.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      We have that 'issue' with many of our Spark workloads where there isn't any of our desired capacity available as spot, but we have a baseline reserved up front instances for anything realtime anyway so with a bit of planning it's a non-issue. It does cost money, but then again, so does not running certain processes. The trick becomes calculating the intersection at which point the costs outweigh the benefits, and that calculation applies everywhere.
  - oneplane 5y ago
Rantenki 5y ago
I have a personal dev cloud on AWS that has: * AWS MSK (Kafka server) with redundant instances across 3 AZs * Aurora Posgres instance with redundancy across 3 AZs * Multiple Lambdas for incoming messages from MQTT to Kafka * IoT/MQTT and about a dozen iot devices sending telemetry continuously (every second) * 20+ services with nearly 40 tasks, running on ECS * All the supporting route53, certificates, VPCs etc. for the above * A bunch of miscellaneous stuff I've forgotten that's used by other developers. * All deployed via TF _THAT_ all costs well under a grand. You're doing it wrong.
- selfmodruntime 5y ago
  Which is most likely the case 99% of times people decry a technology on HN
- dublin 5y ago
  Although he doesn't mention API Gateway in his list, I used to design AWS solutions for people, and it was by far the biggest mistake I saw them make cost-wise: It can get scary-expensive in a hurry, especially if you aren't careful at your cloud architecture and really understand what all you'll be paying for.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Most all of those services are pay for use. Which means listing out the services you use means nothing. The price would be based on your level of usage. I have a bunch of lambdas setup in AWS and it's basically free because at the moment, I'm not running them.
  - Rantenki 5y ago
    Our ECS containers all run continuously processing Kafka messages. Dev has variable throughput, but it's hundreds of messages per second at least. The containers all use between 256MB and 2048MB commits (they're stream processors, so they don't hammer the memory like a stateful monolithic service would). My point was just that it doesn't have to cost over $1k on Amazon to run a combination of services which apparently CAN run in a private lab for $5/mo, however that is calculated. I can't run my full stack even without load (due to memory commit) on my 32GB, 3 year old Xeon workstation, and that would cost a lot more than $5/mo at any provider I am aware of.
johnnyo 5y ago
> So the knowledge required to setup that and hardware is worth around 695$ per month. That's an extremely cheap price to pay if you had to hire someone to do it.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Yeah a single infra engineer in my city gets paid $15k/mo total comp. I get the pain if you’re at “garage with shoestring budget” stage but $1k/mo isn’t even worth the time to set up a billing alarm.
tempnow987 5y ago
$900 a month? The only thing in that list that could come close might be ECS? Are you using ECS anywhere? If you have high compute needs I've had good experience with that and it's cheap. You can put a huge box behind it. I did that (I have ATT fiber to the house) and for the $7/month I could still use all my deploy templates and AWS CLI commands and code to do stuff. I tried this with an AMD home machine (AMD 5900x / 64 GB ram / nvme) and it worked surprisingly well as did a dell server (beefier). I put ubuntu on them, registered them, and they came right up in the plane.
systemvoltage 5y ago
$900/month – whether thats too little or too much entirely depends on the company's revenue/margins. I've seen companies that do not care about AWS spend. It makes close to zero difference to them and just thinking about the cost costs more. On the other spectrum, I've seen companies that move to bare metal servers. A couple of servers and that's all they need. $120/month from $2000/month and it mattered to them. So yeah, what you're saying is sort of meaningless without understanding the business type/stage/revenue/costs.
throwr966 5y ago
5$ per month is pretty impressive. What hardware would you be running this solution on? Typically if you run hardware in a co-located data center there's a fee for that, is that included in the 5$? What did the hardware cost, and based on depreciation, how long will it last before requiring replacement? Is that also included in the 5$ you are quoting here?
smackeyacky 5y ago
That $5 a month figure - does that include your internet connection? I have a far more complicated AWS setup that costs me about $100/mo. I'm assuming the extra costs you are incurring are for data?

by pojzon 5y ago

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

This is true, but I will argue again that I am proficient enough with AWS to deploy a full stack with 10+ lambdas, DNS, certs, RDS, step functions, etc for < 5 dollars a month. You need to understand what to use and what not to. Most of that bill is from the nat gateway/private VPC, which you really dont need

freedomben 5y ago
RDS for < 5 dollars a month?
mitjam 5y ago
How? Last time I looked the smallest RDS for MySQL came at 11 USD.

douglasisshiny 5y ago

>Deployed few services on ecs, nat gateway, shared elb, certificate and route53. >Total cost 30$ per day ~900$ per month. Ummm... I think you're doing something incorrectly. The biggest line items on that list are ELB (assuming you mean Application Load Balancer/ALB) and NAT Gateway. But with that setup, I could maybe imagine $100/month with on-demand plans. Not $900.

hayd 5y ago
NAT is $1/day and ELB is 60cents/day. So those can't (although those costs excludes data transfer...) be the biggest line items.
- Aea 5y ago
  NAT is $1/day *PER* AZ *PER* VPC. Managed NAT Gateways can be a very substantial cost depending on your architecture. I believe the recommended VPC layout has 3 AZs so you're paying close to $100/month for a single VPC just for NAT.
  - pojzon 5y ago
    Ding ding ding, ppl here dont take to account HA and disaster preventions you sometimes have to abaid to due to security certifications and regulations!
    - hayd 5y ago
      So your comparison with your $5 local lab is not just less "convenient"! Do you really need multi-multi-region failover redundancy? Do you really need multiple NATs in every region (it's easy to share one NAT Gateway across AZs, especially so if a region is only servicing DR)? Your numbers still sound high. x $1 + y $0.60 to make up $30 is a _lot_ of regions/AZs.
      - rstupek 5y ago
        Yes the $5/month lab setup compared to a globally redundant service.
jcims 5y ago
How can you say that with ECS on the list? You have no idea how much compute is being used.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  Well he said he can replicate it with a $5/mo setup elsewhere. How much compute can you rent anywhere for $5/mo? How much compute can you get even buying the hardware and amortizing over its useful lifespan for $5/mo (~$300 total)?
  - justinclift 5y ago
    Reading over the post, it says $5 in their "local lab". Which probably means using existing or older hardware, so the $5 is probably electricity costs or similar. And it sounded more like a generalisation anyway. ;)
sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
ECS can get up there if you're backing with large ec2 instances or something either way my biggest problem with services like AWS isn't really cost but that you end up using all of their SDKs and services out of convenicance and it becomes hard to track down or move away from.. it spiders out of control so fast that sometimes its better to spend an extra few weeks doing things the harder way that's not always an issue though espcially for startups

ramraj07 5y ago

what exactly do you set up for 5 bucks a month on your local lab? Sounds more like you’re comparing what lightsail offers, which incidentally costs the same even on aws? If you want a simple sight with just core aws, you can set one up on aws on elastic beanstalk for a few bucks a month. Add an rds for 15 a month. Why will you needlessly overcomplicate the system and then cry foul?

pojzon 5y ago
Tbh 5$ was to just show the order of magnitude. Even if it was 50$ per month, its still alot cheaper. And the cluster we are talking here about is a raspberry box with 10 mashines each 2cpu 8gb, running k8s, replicated storage, my own domain and certificate, metalb load balancers, and few other things. Its not as redundant as AWS, but it never broke in few years of constant work. Chances of all of those machines to break at the same time are astronomically low in normal circumstances. If I spread the cost of that setup over two years of reservation, the monthly cost will be a lot less than 50$.

_pdp_ 5y ago

We have around 20 API GW, at least 20 dynamodb tables and more than 30 lambdas, several queues and opensearch replicated across 2 environments (dev and prod) plus additional programming environments (cloud9) and we barely come close to half of what you you are budgeting here for. Your math is wrong.

pojzon 5y ago
How big are those Opensearch clusters ? Lets take a small production cluster of 4x r6g.large (default proposal for prod) (0.167$/h) deployed in VPC in private subnet (x2 for HA) That’s 16$ per day for instances only and 2.5$ per day for nat-gateways per day. So 18.5$ per day and ~550$ per month. Thats ofcourse if you disable all metrics all logs all alerting etc and it does not include Volumes cost, because its highly dependent on the domain. AWS is expensive because you get alot of administrative work out of the box (snapshots, restores, etc). Tho sometimes have to still fix in the source. Ive personally pushed quite a few fixes to OpenSearch source, coz version 1.0.0 had a lot of issues.

oneplane 5y ago

Is it really the same, or 'similar, but worse'? AWS is expensive, but multi-zone redundancy is expensive anywhere and even worse: it's not available everywhere. That also means that a side-project that doesn't need that redundancy would be a mismatch in terms of requirements anyway. On the other hand, if you need a multi zone automatically available system, you're running out of choices really fast.

bcrosby95 5y ago
Based upon outages when a single AWS zone goes offline, a whole hell of a lot more than side projects aren't taking advantage of multi-zone redundancy. I think what many fail to realize is that - surprise surprise! It isn't that simple. Many think "if my zone goes out, I'll just migrate to a different zone!" Nope! AWS doesn't have the capacity for it - as we've seen many times, AWS can't seem to handle the migratory load when a zone goes out. Sure, the other zones don't really die, but good luck migrating your workload to them. But when touting multi zones, no one ever mentions this little nugget of information.
- pojzon 5y ago
  At my previous work we often were able to saturate all similar instance types in given region.. All AWS had to say was “we are working hard on providing additional capacity”. The same often happens on black friday, where companies scale up their platforms just in case because there might be no capacity on AWS.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    We have that 'issue' with many of our Spark workloads where there isn't any of our desired capacity available as spot, but we have a baseline reserved up front instances for anything realtime anyway so with a bit of planning it's a non-issue. It does cost money, but then again, so does not running certain processes. The trick becomes calculating the intersection at which point the costs outweigh the benefits, and that calculation applies everywhere.
- oneplane 5y ago

Rantenki 5y ago

I have a personal dev cloud on AWS that has: * AWS MSK (Kafka server) with redundant instances across 3 AZs * Aurora Posgres instance with redundancy across 3 AZs * Multiple Lambdas for incoming messages from MQTT to Kafka * IoT/MQTT and about a dozen iot devices sending telemetry continuously (every second) * 20+ services with nearly 40 tasks, running on ECS * All the supporting route53, certificates, VPCs etc. for the above * A bunch of miscellaneous stuff I've forgotten that's used by other developers. * All deployed via TF _THAT_ all costs well under a grand. You're doing it wrong.

selfmodruntime 5y ago
Which is most likely the case 99% of times people decry a technology on HN
dublin 5y ago
Although he doesn't mention API Gateway in his list, I used to design AWS solutions for people, and it was by far the biggest mistake I saw them make cost-wise: It can get scary-expensive in a hurry, especially if you aren't careful at your cloud architecture and really understand what all you'll be paying for.
jjeaff 5y ago
Most all of those services are pay for use. Which means listing out the services you use means nothing. The price would be based on your level of usage. I have a bunch of lambdas setup in AWS and it's basically free because at the moment, I'm not running them.
- Rantenki 5y ago
  Our ECS containers all run continuously processing Kafka messages. Dev has variable throughput, but it's hundreds of messages per second at least. The containers all use between 256MB and 2048MB commits (they're stream processors, so they don't hammer the memory like a stateful monolithic service would). My point was just that it doesn't have to cost over $1k on Amazon to run a combination of services which apparently CAN run in a private lab for $5/mo, however that is calculated. I can't run my full stack even without load (due to memory commit) on my 32GB, 3 year old Xeon workstation, and that would cost a lot more than $5/mo at any provider I am aware of.

johnnyo 5y ago

> So the knowledge required to setup that and hardware is worth around 695$ per month. That's an extremely cheap price to pay if you had to hire someone to do it.

Spivak 5y ago
Yeah a single infra engineer in my city gets paid $15k/mo total comp. I get the pain if you’re at “garage with shoestring budget” stage but $1k/mo isn’t even worth the time to set up a billing alarm.

tempnow987 5y ago

$900 a month? The only thing in that list that could come close might be ECS? Are you using ECS anywhere? If you have high compute needs I've had good experience with that and it's cheap. You can put a huge box behind it. I did that (I have ATT fiber to the house) and for the $7/month I could still use all my deploy templates and AWS CLI commands and code to do stuff. I tried this with an AMD home machine (AMD 5900x / 64 GB ram / nvme) and it worked surprisingly well as did a dell server (beefier). I put ubuntu on them, registered them, and they came right up in the plane.

systemvoltage 5y ago

$900/month – whether thats too little or too much entirely depends on the company's revenue/margins. I've seen companies that do not care about AWS spend. It makes close to zero difference to them and just thinking about the cost costs more. On the other spectrum, I've seen companies that move to bare metal servers. A couple of servers and that's all they need. $120/month from $2000/month and it mattered to them. So yeah, what you're saying is sort of meaningless without understanding the business type/stage/revenue/costs.

throwr966 5y ago

5$ per month is pretty impressive. What hardware would you be running this solution on? Typically if you run hardware in a co-located data center there's a fee for that, is that included in the 5$? What did the hardware cost, and based on depreciation, how long will it last before requiring replacement? Is that also included in the 5$ you are quoting here?

smackeyacky 5y ago

That $5 a month figure - does that include your internet connection? I have a far more complicated AWS setup that costs me about $100/mo. I'm assuming the extra costs you are incurring are for data?