4 ms·

Don't get me wrong, I definitely think the current movement and focus on a great UX is amazing! But as someone that cares a lot about scalability and operationa

by Tehnix 4y ago

Don't get me wrong, I definitely think the current movement and focus on a great UX is amazing! But as someone that cares a lot about scalability and operational complexity + cost, it hurts a little to see certain approaches that'll work great in small scale, but be troublesome at large scale be recommended so strongly :/ > edge compute platform I would consider that quite a big difference in infrastructure. It can easily be done already right now, but the cost and performance equation between serverless compute (at edge or not) v.s. static file serving becomes noticeable at scale. Let's make some pricing examples: - We'll have 2 million "first page loads" per day (~60 million per month) - Let's give our bundle a low estimate of 200KB ------------ Vercel's pricing (just to take a popular example)[0]: - Pro tier: $20/month includes 1m execution units (EU, 50ms of CPU time) and 1TB bandwidth - Then $2 per 1m EU and $40 per 100 GB bandwidth - Let's ignore GB-hours for now (memory x runtime)[1] - Let's assume you're always able to render your SSR page in 50ms or less (quite optimistic if you're doing any form of DB operations in your SSR) AWS CloudFront pricing[2]: - Always free tier: 1TB bandwidth, 10m requests - Then $0.085 per GB bandwidth and $0.0100 per 10k requests - (at scale you can get +50% discount on bandwidth by committing) ------------ We can then run the numbers: - Estimate (200 KB) on Vercel: - (60m requests - 1m free) * $2 per 1m = $118/month - 200 KB * 60 million = 12,000,000,000 kb = 12TB - (12TB - 1TB free) / 0.1 * $40 per 100GB = $4400/month (you'd probably want an Enterprise plan at this point unless I did the math wrong here. Their FAQ suggests to reach out to their sales team which you should definitely be doing at this scale!) - = $118 + $4400 = $4,518/month - Estimate (200 KB) on CloudFront: - (60m requests - 10m free) / 0.01 * $0.01 per 10k request = $50/month - 200 KB * 60 million = 12,000,000,000 kb = 12TB - (12TB - 1TB free) / 0.001 * $0.085 per GB = $935/month (which could be $440/month with reserved capacity) - = $50 + $935 = $985/month ------------ Totally open for having made a calculation error above, but this is the kind of thing that one needs to concern themselves about at scale. The above example is quite realistic, in fact it's a lot less than our usage at my current work. Admittedly here we are seeing most of the cost come from bandwidth. If you substituted Vercel with AWS Lambda you would be able to benefit from the CloudFront pricing on this. [0]: https://vercel.com/pricing https://vercel.com/pricing [1]: https://vercel.com/guides/what-are-gb-hrs-for-serverless-function-execution https://vercel.com/guides/what-are-gb-hrs-for-serverless-fun... [2]: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3

re-thc 4y ago
Great to see someone care about this. So many discussions lack this consideration and ultimately companies pay for it. Yes, I've seen this many times and why there are e.g. consultants that come in to "optimize" the platform. Cost isn't the only thing to care about but performance. Functions might not run in every data center that would have a CDN PoP. The SSR vs SSG comparisons always miss the point and claim SSR is faster but that's only true if you're in a big popular city. As you expand - what about the other customers? Also what about security - that's probably even more important. Each request for Vercel has a higher cost than the equivalent from Cloudfront. What are the safeguards e.g. rate limiting or DoS protection? For Cloudfront you'd need to account for WAF and other expenses. You don't even need a lot of customers - just a bad actor to easily take down your hosting on Vercel. There have been plenty of blogs of startups using serverless setups getting attacked that costed them 1000s - 10000s of dollars. Side note: bandwidth costs vary. Vercel does it with 1 price, so things may vary depending on where your users are. Cloudfront costs can go up. You may also need Cloudfront functions to do a few things.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Yes most edge products have these flaws. Cloudflare Workers do not though (at least not the ones being focused on). They run in every single data center across the world and are collocated with the CDN that you can access programmatically. I wish you all the best of luck if you try to take down the system. It’s handling an insane amount of load already. There’s also no billing for bandwidth. You can manage DDoS and rate limiting protections although I don’t know the pricing on those (could be free - I don’t recall). Disclaimer: work at Cloudflare
  - re-thc 4y ago
    Not 100% unless you only have customers in the US. Correct me if I'm wrong but unless I pay for the business plan I may get re-routed on major ISPs in many countries. Have experienced this 1st hand. For many workloads Cloudflare can be more expensive.
    - 4y ago

by Tehnix 4y ago

re-thc 4y ago

Great to see someone care about this. So many discussions lack this consideration and ultimately companies pay for it. Yes, I've seen this many times and why there are e.g. consultants that come in to "optimize" the platform. Cost isn't the only thing to care about but performance. Functions might not run in every data center that would have a CDN PoP. The SSR vs SSG comparisons always miss the point and claim SSR is faster but that's only true if you're in a big popular city. As you expand - what about the other customers? Also what about security - that's probably even more important. Each request for Vercel has a higher cost than the equivalent from Cloudfront. What are the safeguards e.g. rate limiting or DoS protection? For Cloudfront you'd need to account for WAF and other expenses. You don't even need a lot of customers - just a bad actor to easily take down your hosting on Vercel. There have been plenty of blogs of startups using serverless setups getting attacked that costed them 1000s - 10000s of dollars. Side note: bandwidth costs vary. Vercel does it with 1 price, so things may vary depending on where your users are. Cloudfront costs can go up. You may also need Cloudfront functions to do a few things.

vlovich123 4y ago
Yes most edge products have these flaws. Cloudflare Workers do not though (at least not the ones being focused on). They run in every single data center across the world and are collocated with the CDN that you can access programmatically. I wish you all the best of luck if you try to take down the system. It’s handling an insane amount of load already. There’s also no billing for bandwidth. You can manage DDoS and rate limiting protections although I don’t know the pricing on those (could be free - I don’t recall). Disclaimer: work at Cloudflare
- re-thc 4y ago
  Not 100% unless you only have customers in the US. Correct me if I'm wrong but unless I pay for the business plan I may get re-routed on major ISPs in many countries. Have experienced this 1st hand. For many workloads Cloudflare can be more expensive.
  - 4y ago