Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The application I am currently working on is all lambdas ~ 45, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Cognito, and SQS and SNS. My employer has several serverless applications with relatively moderate use, and I work on one of them. Our total cloud costs for the product I work on for our DEV/STAGE/PROD/SANDBOX environments is currently less than $1,000/mo. Our estimated cost of DataDog monitoring for the next year just on my application is at least 23k/yr using negotiated rates. We don’t have crazy traffic, but do have global users invoking all of our lambdas at least once an hour. DataDog charges a fixed monthly cost for each lambda invoked at least once an hour on average. Then, you also need to pay for ingestion, storage, and custom metrics. Just on my product alone with multiple isolated environments, this gets expensive.

Many other product teams at my work have lightly used serverless apps. The DataDog costs simply aren’t feasible for serverless apps. We’re actively looking into alternatives such as just using CloudWatch, Elastic, etc as it’s a huge cost for us.

Wonder how much it would be if you just used all the native AWS tools for things you get from Datadog.

As far as I understand, AWS native tools like Cloudwatch are not as good

thanks for the detailed note.

I was just checking Datadog pricing for serverless, there is says - $7.20 per active function per month. If you are using 45 lambdas, is the number of functions much higher? I am guessing ~200 or so?

Though I can see, how charging based on functions can quickly shoot up the bill

The problem is we have 4 isolated environments so it’s 4x number of lambdas. Plus, since you only pay for lambdas when they’re running we also deploy developers PRs in AWS so that we can test their API changes with integration tests before merging those changes in. The fixed cost is a killer. We have developers on our team in India, Ukraine, and the US so even our dev environment is used 24x7 essentially.

What are the 4 isolate environments in your case? Dev, test, accp, and prod? If so, you almost slash the cost by 50% by only monitoring accp and prod. Can be accomplished by introducing a toggle in your lambda’s.

Are you sure you need to monitor the PR lambdas? If they're going to make it to one of the 3 environments before prod.

@cebert have you checked out Scanner.dev? It uses sparse skip-list indexing and serverless components to let you query a terabyte of logs in seconds and pricing is around the same as Cloudwatch

Time to look into what output DD delivers which drives service/product decisions with financial impact and look for an alternative to re-implement. Stop being hypnotized by the fancy blinkenlights.

@cebert Have you looked at us serverless specific solutions like Thundra (my company), Serverless.com, etc.? I think the cost for use case may be order of magnitude lower since the pricing is only based on number of invocations.

Can you tell me what the difference is between your DEV and SANDBOX environemnts is? Curious to know.

We typically use Sandbox for significant deployment changes such as upgrading to Node 16, updating security policies, etc. in an isolated environment. If things break, it doesn’t impact DEV/QA.

Ahh gotcha.. Thanks for the info. Thats useful to know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com