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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I thought the same. This guy isn't even doing business via his site as far as I can tell. How is it that you set up such a monstrosity of services instead of renting a server for a couple bucks that comes with a decent amount of traffic per month and just caps your link or throttles if you go over it.

But I guess simply running Debian on some server and keeping that up to date just isn't cool anymore. Everyone running a blog about their dog needs Cloudflare, S3, heroku, micro services and docker. Obviously with no limit on what kind of bill they will generate should something go wrong. You can just vent on twitter and generate enough attention that the vendor will make an exception for you and pay you back to limit the negative publicity. Who wouldn't prefer that to the tedious work that is maintaining a Linux install on a server?

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I mean the “monstrosity of services” is a bucket holding files and a CDN. It’s 2 services. I do this for my site (that gets no traffic and hasnt been updated in years) and it’s quite nice to not have to admin a server.

Now that said it looks like his job is in cloud evangelism too so I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills. I’d recommend anyone do that, getting a look at aws without whatever your company is doing on top of it is pretty awesome for learning. Just don’t host massive S3 images and shoot yourself in the foot ;-)

What do you guys do when admining a server to make it so time-consuming/bothersome?

If you just host static content you don't even need to care about security updates. Just deploy a new instance, "apt install nginx", done, forget about it. I would say less work than setting it all up on AWS.

When is the last time there was an remote exploit for nginx serving static files or in Linux kernel? You dont even need to worry about security updates in this scenario.

> I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills.

Yeah, he seems to be responsible for OpenShift (marketing?) at Red Hat and he only learnt how expensive AWS is when he got a bill? Bit embarassing.

Not making any arguments about the author, but there is a bit more work to a static site than just apt install nginx. You need to make sure your firewall is setup correctly, users are added and keys managed, ssh config has correct settings, services start automatically, certificates. Either need to deal with certs on your own or get a cdn. Either way, more work than apt install

apt install nginx will set the users for you and it also starts automatically on start, ssh default config is perfectly fine, keys are set up automatically when you start the instance - any cloud provider/VPS service/even kvm with 'uvtools' does this for your (and even if not, it's one ssh-copy-id command).

But yes you need to run, for example, a certbot as well to setup certificates.

so it's: apt install nginx apt install certbot certbot certonly -d your.domain -d www.your.domain # again, when you apt install certbot it installs the cron/timer automatically for automatic certificates renewly and nginx reload

Still less work than going the CDN route I would say.

It really seems to me you don't trust default linux settings and need to take care of everything and fine tune everything but you trust CDN providers thus making the CDN route less work for you. If you trust default settings of a linux distro, it's less time consuming setting it up yourself on linux. Yes that's how user-friendly it really is today.

I don’t know but on a site like a Hacker News I would expect an attitude where people like to hack on this kind of stuff, and not everyone wants “the most boring” type of setup.

The problem is that, at least in the case of public clouds, there’s a real risk of your bill exploding. I guess the author learned a lesson here, but I don’t think it’s the right attitude to start blaming the guy for “it makes no sense to tinker with AWS services” over here. Learning is probably one of his goals.

I would expect an attitude towards efficiency, driven by measurements and objectivity, engineering and professionalism, not a reckless, for fun, why-not, hype-based one.

This strikes me as a pretty narrow view of the hacker mindset. Sure, "hype-driven" is not exactly hacker-y, but "reckless," "for fun," and "why not" all sound exactly like hacker attitudes to me. A prime example would be Claude Shannon, who built tons of useless overcomplicated things just for fun in addition to coming up with information theory.

I wish AWS and other clouds would cater to this crowd (which I'm a part of). I just closed my AWS account to remove this exact risk. I love hacking around and playing with the various services—it satisfies my own curiosity and also helps me at work—but it's not worth putting my financial security at risk to keep these accounts open. More than once I've stress-checked my AWS bill in the middle of the night because I was worried there'd be some hidden bill or somebody hacked in and blew up the network traffic or compute or whatever. It's just not worth the loss of peace of mind.

I wonder if a potential solution is to have two billing modes that get hardlocked at signup (or require a key or something to change): one is the standard model with alerts etc. The other is a personal model that kills all of your stuff when you go over some limit. I would feel much safer if the latter were in place.

Why not setup budgets?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

I do this with my startups, so why not do this with your sandbox account?

Because they want a hard guaranteed ceiling on charges, not after-the-fact alerting for spikes in chargeable activity.

AWS does not support a 'pre-pay' model, and to my knowledge there's no water-tight way of capping your costs. Yes, you can build an watchdog to nuke all your instances if you go over-budget, but there's still the risk of missing some unexpected source of costs, or misconfiguring your watchdog, or perhaps not getting there in time, etc.

AWS could support pre-pay, but they don't. I think it's a reasonable criticism. There are plenty of horror stories about surprise AWS bills. [0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412869

Reminds me of that time we accidentally left a really large Redshift cluster online, for two weeks, before somebody noticed. It was around $12.5k if my memory serves me right.

Never managed to get the money back. They always seem to focus on building tools around reporting (ie “budgets” being just a report, rather than an actual enforceable budget).

But I still can’t escape the fear of accidentally triggering something that costs a lot. It still happens sometimes, a sudden $1k EFS bill being the latest.

This is pretty much what the Azure Visual Studio subscription does for you. It sets up a playground with $150 monthly credit and automatic spending limit of $0. Hard lock here is a credit card being supplied, which is optional. I wish more cloud providers would offer such plans.

What happens if you overrun your credit? Does it explode your instances and storage volumes?

(I wouldn't have any problem with this, just seeking clarification.)

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi... for the documented behaviour. Note also it doesn’t necessarily apply to Azure Marketplace. That said, they really want you to upgrade to pay-as-you-go...

This credit is not allowed to be used for production workloads and they can automatically spin down your workload at any time. Also the $150 credit is only for enterprise VS, for pro it’s only $50/mo.

Exactly because you are a hacker you should be most interested in the most boring possible kind of setup. Those folks never heard of KISS, huh?

The whole article just read as a "I don't even now what I'm doing"-thing.

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