I ran up like a $5k bill over a couple weeks by having an application log in a hot loop when it got disconnected from another service in the same cluster. When I wrote that code, I expected the warnings to eventually get hooked up to page us to let us know that something was broken.
Turns out, disconnections happen regularly because ingress connections have like a 30 minute timeout by default. So it would time out, emit like 5 GB of logs before Kubernetes noticed the container was unhealthy and restarted it, rinse and repeat.
I know $5k is chump change at enterprise scale, but this was at a small scale startup during the initial development phase, so it was definitely noticed. Fortunately, the only thing that happened to me was some good-natured ribbing.
Years ago I was told that serverless would be cheaper than running your own servers. It seems like it’s not necessarily cheaper, but just a different way of designing a solution. Would you agree with that assessment? I have never used serverless. Every place I’ve worked needed tightly controlled data so on premises only.
Meanwhile I host my personal website on dirt cheap VPS.
The thing with serverless is you’re paying for iowait. In a regular server, like an EC2 or Fargate instance, when one thread is waiting for a reply from a disk or network operation the server can do something else. With serverless you only have one thread so you’re paying for this time even though it’s not actually using any CPU.
While you’re paying for that time you can bet that CPU thread is busy servicing some other customer and also charging them.
I like serverless for it’s general reliability, it’s one less thing to worry about, and it is cheap when you start out thanks to generous free tiers, at scale it’s a more complex answer as whether it is good value or not.
