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Comment by bfung | Hacker News Reader

Hard to confirm the article and the tweet. The author should provide the exact details and operations for someone to replicate and verify, or at least do the math.

The mongodb pricing page says one can setup a M10 instance for $57/month. [https://www.mongodb.com/pricing]

Racking up a $2500/day bill is several of magnitudes off - there’s nothing in the article to help put the workload in context.

I have zero interest in mongodb, as a stock or a technology, but this article doesn’t help to actually determine anything about cloud costs. (Lack of data points, irreproducible method and conclusion)

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Author here.

I used the "Serverless" product, not the "Dedicated" product. That's the gap you see here.

But your point is important, I'll add it to the post. Thank you.

That makes it even more sus. Can you describe your workload? Unless you were doing something extremely heavy-duty for a long time, I just don't see this being at all factual.

Was your code not written with cost control in mind because there was a finite hardware limit you were running yourselves up against? Otherwise, I am baffled at how the difference could be so great between the three.

How much did you actually pay them?

+1 - the post speaks about 100 times difference between VM and Atlas setup. At a glance, Atlas cloud has typical ~ 20% premium if we compare their pricing to AWS/Azure VM setup. 20% is not x100. So IMHO and AFAIK we're speaking here about serious misconfiguration.

I did manage to approach his costs by running a sharded cluster with our largest configuration (M600 nodes with 640GB RAM. 4TB storage and 3.8m IOPS).

That is priced quite clearly on the bottom page at 102.49 USD an hour.

Depending on exact specifications that is like $10k of hardware, so 4 days of rent pays the machine in full.

So in this service the actual cost of the hardware is a rounding error. It also needs power, cooling, a roof and some maintenance crew, but that still doesn't come close to the rental price. So what are customers actually paying for?

Obviously we cannot launch such 3node cluster in Azure/AWS for $800/month :-)

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