[HN Gopher] Almost free serverless on-demand Minecraft server in...
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Almost free serverless on-demand Minecraft server in AWS
Author : ptrik
Score : 347 points
Date : 2021-09-08 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| You can host Minecraft servers for free on Oracle Cloud's "Always
| Free" tier [1] now that they've added free ARM cores. You get 4
| cores and 24GB(!) of RAM to assign to up to 4 VMs - more than
| enough for a server for friends or family.
|
| [1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
| nzgrover wrote:
| I did this literately yesterday following this guide:
| https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-r...
|
| Kids played for a couple of hours last night without issue.
| Levitz wrote:
| It should even be able to load mods without any issue right?
| If I recall correctly mod installation in minecraft is
| nothing more than placing some files in a folder?
| qersist3nce wrote:
| This still needs credit cards or phone numbers right?
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| Yes.
| xuki wrote:
| I don't remember giving them my credit card during my
| registration.
| gruez wrote:
| I explicitly remember them asking for both when they
| first launched
| xuki wrote:
| Yeah that's not the case for me. I only gave them a phone
| number. The salesperson did give me a call, but gave up
| after I explicitly said I'm only here for the free stuff.
| joosters wrote:
| Yes, although in the signup, it claims that they won't charge
| you unless you upgrade your account from the free tier - i.e.
| at the end of the trial period, you won't get a surprise
| subscription bill because you forgot to cancel something.
| pantulis wrote:
| Oracle and "always free"? Boy are these interesting times...
| bbarnett wrote:
| They're probably always free, until $x happens.
|
| Then there's an audit, you're found non-compliant, and now
| they own your house.
|
| Oracle, 2021.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| From what I understand, suing people is a great business
| strategy. Much better than producing any actual value.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I mean, it bought a Hawaiian island. Capitalism at its
| finest, really.
| Mrdarknezz wrote:
| Almost sounds like a paradox
| tootie wrote:
| It's hilarious given that they used to charge you per CPU
| _for software_. You had to bring your own CPUs.
| Eeems wrote:
| Pretty sure they still do for some software they sell ;)
| jonfw wrote:
| That's still a common billing model- how Red Hat bills for
| openshift for instance.
|
| It's a simple and pretty good proxy for usage
| bityard wrote:
| Oracle and VMware per-socket licensing is one of the main
| reasons server-class CPUs have gazillions of cores. A
| vSphere licence+support for a single machine can easily run
| into 5 figures.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Maybe thats why POWER chips have so many SMT threads per
| core
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I'm sure the TOS says "terms and conditions may change at any
| time in the future". Always is a trademark and not meant to
| convey any future services.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Pretty sure every website will tell you everything is
| subject to change at any time at their leisure.
| nzealand wrote:
| > To enable us to provide free Oracle Cloud accounts to our
| valued customers, we need to ensure that account holders
| are real people. We use your email, phone number, and
| credit/debit card for account set-up and identity
| verification. For users in the United States, you may see
| temporary charges of $1 on your account statement. Users in
| other countries will see a similar charge in their local
| currency. These are verification holds that will be removed
| automatically, typically within 3 to 5 days.
|
| > We will not use your credit/debit card information to
| automatically upgrade your Always Free or Free Trial to
| paid without first getting your explicit approval.
|
| I gave a throw away google email and google voice and just
| used my first initials, the one thing I could not use was a
| throw away debit card, they really wanted a real credit
| card.
|
| So far so good.
|
| One guy complained they shut his server off after he
| transitioned from the $300 free credits in the first month
| to always free.
|
| I didn't have that issue, although I do check the billing
| statements periodically.
| wryun wrote:
| Well, thanks for this. Now I can have fun running
| https://www.brow.sh when ssh'd in from by original Raspberry
| Pi.
|
| Yes, there is no point to this, but if it's free... ?
| 7ewis wrote:
| How can they offer that for free!?
|
| I'm sure in GCP's Always Free tier the server they offer only
| has 0.5GB RAM.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| First one's always free. The cloud providers are vying for
| market share, and free tiers so that people / companies have
| buy-in is one of the ways to do so. It worked for Dropbox.
| hashworks wrote:
| GCP increased that recently.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| > How can they offer that for free!?
|
| Opinion: They're losing badly in the Cloud Wars and need to
| scrape together some sort of customer base in any way they
| can, even if it means burning money.
| jl6 wrote:
| And if they've spent $billions building out huge capacity
| data centres, but only have a few customers, then they
| might have large amount of capacity sitting idle that costs
| them very little to put into the Always Free tier. It's
| free developer-mindshare-marketing anyway.
| swarnie wrote:
| I can see why....
|
| Three times i've tried using OCI to move Oracles own
| products from on-prem to cloud. All three times they told
| me not to bother as it wasn't supported.
|
| Seriously if Oracle can't figure out how to run RDBMS,
| Weblogic and Opera what hope have i got?
| eertami wrote:
| I tried this today, picking a local home region that wasn't in
| their list of "oversubscribed" regions (Zurich) and have not
| been able to create an instance. Even 1vCPU/1GB RAM is
| seemingly unavailable.
| nzealand wrote:
| There is a script for that, I was able to score a 3CPU/12GB
| Ram after a few days.
|
| https://hitrov.medium.com/resolving-oracle-cloud-out-of-
| capa...
| hibachi_drama wrote:
| I'm wondering if I can use this to host Ark for 10 players. The
| cost of clustering all of the maps on dedicated servers is like
| $60/month or more.
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| Are those ARM-based instances fast enough? Last I tried, Oracle
| Cloud's free tier "AMD" instances (with 1/8 vCPU) were so slow
| that I could not use them for any useful applications. Even
| their network speed was slow.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as
| one VM or up to 4 VMs."_
|
| Here's the Anandtech review of the Ampere Altra, which is
| what Oracle is serving these VMs from:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-
| review...
|
| The TLDR:
|
| _" The Altra's strengths lie in compute-bound workloads
| where having 25% more cores is an advantage. The Neoverse-N1
| cores clocked at 3.3GHz can more than match the per-core
| performance of Zen2 inside the EPYC CPUs.
|
| There are still workloads in which the Altra doesn't do as
| well - anything that puts higher cache pressure on the cores
| will heavily favours the EPYC as while 1MB per core L2 is
| nice to have, 32MB of L3 shared amongst 80 cores isn't very
| much cache to go around."_
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| I run 3 servers on a single 4-core host using the Paper fork
| of Minecraft. Works great, I get 20TPS even with some pretty
| large farms.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I would love to see this for Valheim.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Valheim dedicated servers are about the same overhead as a
| minecraft world (from what I can see running both side by side
| on windows anyway). It also supports linux, so you could
| probably do very similarly for Valheim.
| 300bps wrote:
| I always say the best way to learn a new technology is to work on
| a real-world project that you are interested in.
|
| The person that set this up got an amazing education on use of
| real-world AWS services.
|
| A lot of IT people aren't aware that things like this exist. They
| think moving to the cloud means sending all your virtual servers
| to your provider of choice and running them 24x7 like you did on-
| prem. In my opinion it's more about architecting solutions so
| that resources pop into existence for the exact # of milliseconds
| they're needed and then they're released. This is a clever step
| along that path.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Most people that move a whole set of on-prem machines to
| virtual servers actually need them on and available all day
| long.
| 300bps wrote:
| What you're saying is true for a tiny minority of use cases.
|
| The vast majority of use cases are better off with variable
| resource availability. Unless you're doing something akin to
| mining cryptocurrency 24x7x365 most workloads are variable to
| some degree.
|
| So maybe instead of one giant server that processes requests
| you use a single small server that is available 24x7x365.
| Then if your workload increases at 8 am you use an
| autoscaling group to spin up 3 more. Then at 5 pm it goes
| back down to 1. And maybe you have a batch process that kicks
| off at 2 am every night so you spin up 4 servers to process
| requests. This is just one example so it's important not to
| focus on it and respond with, "Well what about x!" AWS has
| many ways to fulfill the promise of accomplishing tasks with
| minimal resources.
|
| And all of this is just a step on the path to serverless
| computing with things like Lambda and DynamoDB or serverless
| RDS.
| ylyn wrote:
| This is so complicated.
|
| I did this with a Minecraft plugin that would schedule a systemd
| shutdown in 30 minutes when the last player disconnects, and
| cancel the shutdown if a player connects.
|
| Then a simple webpage that sent an EC2 API request to power on
| the instance, and a simple plugin that sends a Telegram message
| when the server is ready for connections.
| balls187 wrote:
| > Then a simple webpage that sent an EC2 API request to power
| on the instance
|
| You send the EC2 API request directly from a public facing
| website?
| simonw wrote:
| This is a really smart setup, and superbly documented.
|
| I just wish there weren't so many steps to get this kind of thing
| running! Even with automation it's still a LOT - getting this
| running myself would take me a few hours, and I have prior
| relevant experience.
|
| A regular non-software-industry-professional parent has little
| chance.
|
| I really wish there were better ways to make AWS stuff like this
| available for people to use without requiring them to have deep
| knowledge of how to work with different aspects of AWS.
| kaydub wrote:
| PR a cloudformation template
| simonw wrote:
| My hunch is that even a cloudformation template would be way
| beyond the capabilities of most non-software-engineers.
|
| I wish AWS would provide some kind of interface where I can
| redirect a regular human being to easy-
| deploy.aws.com/?cloudformation=url-to-my-cloud-formation and
| they would be presented with a human-readable form that tells
| them what it will do, sets a hard limit on how much money it
| will be able to burn through (for protection against crypto-
| currency mining scams), enter their credit card details and
| click "Deploy" to start using it.
| flatiron wrote:
| For all that work why wouldn't they just use a droplet for $5 a
| month?
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Hey, it's a good resource for kids without money.
|
| Considering all the hours I spent looking for ways to do
| exactly this when I was 12-15... I don't doubt I would've gone
| through all the trouble and even learned some AWS along the
| way.
|
| Back in those days the only way I could get a free server was
| by hosting a phpBB forum on 000webhost and somehow convincing a
| VPS provider to "sponsor our forum". They'd get a massive
| banner ad and I'd get a free server to play around with. The
| good days!
| fastball wrote:
| Not sure this is applicable to anyone else, but when it comes
| to being a kid with no money for me that meant literally no
| digital money. I had no bank account (at least not with a
| debit card associated) and my parents would not have given me
| theirs.
|
| But the difference between a couple bucks a month and $5 once
| you actually have the ability to pay for stuff online does
| seems pretty negligible.
| jjice wrote:
| Very good point. I remember being so excited when I got my
| first job at 16 and opened a bank account because I could
| finally purchase things online without having to do
| something like buy a prepaid debit card, which always had
| an overhead fee.
|
| Even after that, I was always frugal and never wanted to
| spend something like $15 a month for a server for my
| friends. Now, as an adult software developer, I wouldn't
| think twice about the fun to dollar ratio of paying for a
| Minecraft server to connect with some old friends.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Same here! I had access to prepaid cards, but sadly cloud
| providers just don't accept them. (At least DigitalOcean
| didn't!)
| sergiomattei wrote:
| You're actually right, it's an oversight from my comment. I
| was in the same spot: some savings, none digital, parents
| weren't going to pay anything.
|
| In any case, if it gets kids learning new things under the
| guise of saving a very limited resource, I'm all for it!
| kroltan wrote:
| Here in Brazil there is a very widely supported payment
| method "boleto bancario", where basically the
| seller/provider prints you a bill that you can pay with a
| bank account, or in cash at physical locations (usually
| lottery houses and post offices).
|
| In fact, some websites even offer big discounts (like 15%)
| for payments in boleto since there is basically no service
| fee.
|
| That is basically how me and all my friends did "online"
| transactions.
| simonklitj wrote:
| Man, I used 000webhost a lot! Thanks for the reminder.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| It was pretty great! There were a ton of free webhosts back
| then, they really fueled my creativity and desire to learn
| web dev.
|
| 000webhost, x10Hosting and SixServe (both had FREE
| cPanel!!), and never forget those shady reseller control
| panel hosts like Nazuka.
| depaya wrote:
| Hunting around for free cPanel hosting was essentially my
| part time job when I was 12-18. Many of them required
| certain forum activity too, so it could get time
| consuming.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Same here! Hours and hours searching.
|
| I'll admit though, the shady reseller hosts were pretty
| good. Terrible control panel aside, they had very
| generous CPU/bandwidth/storage limits compared to the
| free cPanel hosts that had to cut down the costs there.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| By _droplet_ do you mean a DigitalOcean VM?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That is what they are called
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, "droplet" is what DO calls them.
| Aeolun wrote:
| $5 a month would have been a LOT to young me. Maybe not
| unbearably so, but if someone told me of a way to do it for
| free, I would have definitely tried that method.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| They simply don't work.
|
| The cheap VPS's absolutely do not allow you to pin the CPU to
| 100% usage for a significant amount of time since that messes
| up the provisioning. A Minecraft server will definitely pin the
| CPU to 100%.
|
| What happens is that your process will be killed repeatedly.
|
| A $5 VPS is great for simple site hosting and a small amount of
| CPU workload. They do not work at all for any type of game
| server.
|
| >As long as you don't go to 100% CPU usage for a long period of
| time, everything will be okay. DigitalOcean are doing pro
| active monitoring and will see if your droplet is having 100%
| CPU usage all the time and may limit the CPU capacity of the
| droplets displaying this behavior. Since each droplet shares
| physical hardware with other droplets, constant 100% CPU use
| degrades the service quality for other users on the same node.
|
| Note that a game server will go to 100%. It will be killed.
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-l...
| Teckla wrote:
| I've run a Minecraft server on a $10/month DigitalOcean VPS
| for years.
|
| What you describe has never happened to me. Have I just been
| lucky?
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| Because you can't run a playable Minecraft server on a 5$/mo vm
| (especially if you play with mods) and you don't need the
| server to be on 24/7 if you just play with some friends. This
| gives you the ability to automatically spin a powerful server
| when needed (say a dozen hours a week) and only pay that amount
| instead of the full 168 hours.
| meekins wrote:
| To me a DNS lookup spinning up a container on Fargate looks both
| very cool and scary at the same time.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I'd never heard of the approach before and assumed it wasn't
| possible so that's a nice TIL- but ya relying on obscurity to
| contain costs seems like a recipe for a surprise bill.
| AlfeG wrote:
| Better be sure not to share DNS name to anyone
| [deleted]
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| Id rather just host a minecraft server on an old desktop, and
| make it internet-available with playit.gg.
|
| A lot less chance of me spending $$ that way.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| This 100%.
|
| I don't even bother with playit.gg - just forward a couple
| ports on the router and pass out my ip. Only time my dynamic ip
| changes is when I lose power, and if I've lost power the server
| is down for "Maintenance" anyways.
| Fogest wrote:
| Or you can just use a dynamic ip service and use that URL
| anyway. That would keep the IP up to date. That is what I
| have done for years and it has worked well.
| milesvp wrote:
| Depending on the machine this might cost you more in
| electricity than a VPS. 100watts continuous costs something
| like $7/mo in a fairly low electricity cost region of the US.
| Fogest wrote:
| That would be assuming the machine is on 24/7 and only be
| used for Minecraft. A lot of Minecraft management systems
| allow the Minecraft server to be shut off when no players are
| on which would limit how many resources are being used on the
| machine 24/7 too.
|
| Overall I personally prefer a VPS or dedicated server but I
| don't think comparing it like you are is 100% fair.
| stjo wrote:
| I wrote effectively the same thing without AWS lambdas
| https://playmcnow.com/
|
| It's so cheap[1] to start and stop servers on demand that I've
| decided to give "away" servers for free. I wrote a little proxy
| in Go that detects minecraft login requests and starts a server
| with the specific world. After a dropped connection I stop it.
|
| [1] For 15EUR/month you can have ~30 servers running in parallel
| and thousands of powered down worlds. https://contabo.com/en/vps/
| wyager wrote:
| Those Contabo VPSs are shockingly cheap. Seemingly several
| times cheaper than, say, vultr. How do they do it?
| xfer wrote:
| Massive cpu steal and poor storage io performance.
| generalizations wrote:
| I could see a couple ways to make it work - use the NVME
| drives they mention as swap space to get cheaper, but lower
| perf RAM, and put multiple vCPUs on each core. Lower
| performance, but still exactly what they offered.
|
| But that's my skepticism talking.
| megawu wrote:
| Wow this is really cool, thanks for making it free as it seems
| really handy, one question though, is there a way to get op to
| use commands for creative mode etc? Also my skin doesn't seem
| to load on the server for some reason but it's not the end of
| the world. Thanks.
| stjo wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out! Op commands are disabled because I
| haven't gotten around to making every user admin by default.
| I also remember some vague security concerns on the back of
| my head ;D. It would be cooler if I could also let you change
| the game mode from the web interface.
|
| As for the skins - servers run in "offline mode", which means
| no communication with the Microsoft authentication API
| responsible for validating accounts and (I believe) giving
| skins to players.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Would you say their lower M tier is enough to run just a couple
| of worlds? (Possibly modded.)
| stjo wrote:
| Yup. In my experience a stable server requires about 700MB of
| RAM. There are reports on
| https://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/ saying you can run it in
| 200 MB but I haven't managed. Probably with the right
| swappiness settings, performance tuning of the JVM and the
| Spigot / PaperMC instance.
|
| So 16GB of ram should be enough for 20-60 servers.
| stjo wrote:
| BTW, other fun hacks include:
|
| 1) Initial world creation is quite slow - 10-15 seconds on a
| moderately powerful hardware. Since I want first joins to be as
| fast as possible, I keep 1000 pre-generated worlds and one of
| them is chosen randomly to be used as template on your first
| login.
|
| 2) In addition to login packets, minecraft clients send a ping
| packet to check if the server is online. I forge a valid
| response because I don't want to start a server just so you can
| see "server is up, 0 players online".
| doctorray wrote:
| I was looking for a way to incorporate forging responses to
| the pings but couldn't find a way to consistently have a
| socket open on 25565 that didn't incur a hard monthly cost.
| Your service and approach looks great, I'm surprised I didn't
| run across it when researching before...
| BeefySwain wrote:
| This gives me an idea for recycling the powered down worlds
| into "new" worlds for new users. Being able to see and use
| the abandoned bases of past players would be quite fun.
|
| You could take this a step further by "decaying" the bases in
| some way (remove torches, remove some large percent of the
| items in chests, add vines, weather rock, move blocks from
| the ceiling to the floor, etc)
| rapind wrote:
| You get to explore an ancient civilization that went
| extinct!
| teawrecks wrote:
| Fwiw, there are public servers that have been running for a
| decade now that have a similar effect. The world is chock
| full of player content just sitting around waiting to be
| rediscovered.
| wst_ wrote:
| This is great idea, but may be tricky as people often just
| mess around with the world. You would need to, somehow,
| decide which abandoned base is visually appealing and/or
| matches the environment.
| stjo wrote:
| If my memory serves me correctly, it is rather easy to
| decouple natural from player made blocks. It was either
| stored separately on storage or at worst you can deduce
| it by "subtracting" a fresh chunk generated from the
| seed.
|
| Then you just need a good heuristic to guess whether or
| not a group of blocks matches your definition of a base
| to be explored.
| BeefySwain wrote:
| Yep!
|
| You could take this a step further; once you have
| determined that a set of chunks have been modified
| significantly, you could apply that set of changes to the
| same coordinates of any map generated from that seed,
| meaning you can combine changes from multiple worlds into
| one (with the same seed).
| nkrisc wrote:
| Even without modifying the world it's an interesting idea.
| Basically the option to fork some random person's world as
| your new one.
| ballenf wrote:
| Cool way to see and judge phallus build quality.
| asdff wrote:
| At least the issue with that years ago was when minecraft
| would have an update that introduced some new generated
| resource where you would have to get to the edge of the map
| to generate some to use. Most servers restart periodically
| to get fresh resources near spawn, not only for new
| resources that might have come out in recent updates, but
| just because the area has been completely harvested by past
| players like some scarred piece of land and you need to
| start venturing out far to find trees or ore.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Is there a mod that gradually adds new resources to old
| worlds, gradually adds ores back to their gaps in caves,
| gradually restores the environment, as well as gradually
| removing torches and "decaying" old structures?
|
| Otherwise someone should make one. No need to full reset
| servers any more.
| BeefySwain wrote:
| I'd love to discuss helping out with this project, but I
| don't see a way to contact you on your HN profile or on the
| site. Is that something you are open to?
| stjo wrote:
| Sure, get in touch at stanislav.ltb[at]gmail[dot]com :D
| BeefySwain wrote:
| Sent!
| [deleted]
| endgame wrote:
| Another take on this is to intercept the login message and use
| that as the trigger: https://github.com/infinisil/on-demand-
| minecraft
| okdjnfweonfe wrote:
| Could combine both: a vps running a login-message-only server,
| that spins up another server and then touches the DNS settings:
| As a bonus this "fixes" all the issues with proxying (doesn't
| erase the end user's IP or other such metadata for moderating)
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| Gotta say, I never had good luck with AWS Lambda Serverless. Blew
| through the free quota playing around with a django app deployed
| using Zappa. Never got out of the "let me make sure this works
| when deployed" phase.
| shog_hn wrote:
| I've got a Minecraft server running in AWS with a graviton / ARM
| spot instance + EFS for persistence. It's also cheap to run (I
| run mine 24/7 and it hosts multiple other services as docker
| containers). Cost ~$10 per month. Infrastructure deployed with
| aws-cdk
|
| https://www.shogan.co.uk/gaming/cheap-minecraft-server-in-aw...
| academia_hack wrote:
| This is awesome! I'm still afraid that one of my friends will go
| on a Minecraft binge (or idle in a farm) and drive up the costs
| beyond the $13/month or so I pay for VPS hosting but I think this
| approach would objectively be quite a bit cheaper for the casual
| vanilla SMP server I run for a dozen or so folks. Anyone know how
| to estimate the "worst case" monthly cost for this config?
|
| Edit: Just saw that the GitHub includes a link to an AWS
| calculator. Looks like a month of continuous usage caps out at
| $40-ish. Not too bad since my realistic worst case is probably
| more like 8/hrs per day rather than the full 24.
| [deleted]
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Private minecraft servers as a service doesn't exist yet ?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Private minecraft servers as a service doesn't exist yet ?
|
| They do but, afaik, there's no "spin up and down" ones that
| charge you for usage; they're all "$X per month" fixed cost.
|
| (Although looking at the costs these days, they're not that
| much higher than this would cost you for even a medium-sized
| world.)
| udbhavs wrote:
| There is https://exaroton.com/:en/
| fastball wrote:
| If you're worried about idling in farms just auto-kick after 1
| hour of AFK or w/e.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Why idle in farms? Can't you just put down a chunk loader or
| something?
| fastball wrote:
| It's been a while since I played minecraft, so I don't know
| what a chunk loader is.
|
| When I played, if nobody was in the vicinity of the chunks
| with your farm in it it would unload and of course then the
| farm would not produce, so people would AFK in their farm
| to keep the chunks loaded.
| maybevain wrote:
| Some Minecraft mods add items that force the game to keep
| certain chunks loaded. From the casual "Can't you just" I
| assume the parent meant those. It is however also
| possible, but much more complicated, to force the game to
| keep chunks loaded in Vanilla Minecraft. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx5Wd28AKxQ (the
| video is a couple years old so the current implementation
| might be different, but I think the basic principles are
| still the same).
| zimpenfish wrote:
| ilmango dropped a new chunk loader a few weeks back -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8z7q_pwjL4
|
| Looks pretty easy to build.
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| That would have much the same cost effect if the server
| were kept up for it, and wouldn't be effective if the
| server were taken down.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| If it's a mob farm, a chunk loader won't work on its own, I
| think?
| bussierem wrote:
| I've seen one offhand comment about this so far from someone
| else, scrolling through the comments here. Wanted to make it a
| top-level comment though:
|
| This is PHENOMENALLY DOCUMENTED. I am thoroughly impressed,
| @doctorray. Clear and easy to follow walkthrough and explanation
| of how it works, amazing troubleshooting tips, suggestions for
| managing it... This is an exemplar of a well-made README for a
| service. Bravo!
| doctorray wrote:
| Thanks so much, I really appreciate your comment.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Lately word "serverless" is used freely on HN. Want a clickbait
| title? use "serverless", damn be that only 4 words later "server"
| is used too
| bogwog wrote:
| An "almost free serverless server" sounds like a joke/scam.
|
| It's a serverless server (aka nothing), and it's _almost_ free,
| so you 're paying money for nothing.
| lez wrote:
| Blame Amazon for coining the term.
| mt_ wrote:
| The only thing missing is an IaC definition of this architecture.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| "ECS Fargate service to a desired task count of 1"
|
| This qualifies as "serverless" now?
| reilly3000 wrote:
| It does, as its user has little control over the underlying
| hardware/VM and it's intended for on-demand use cases. It's
| managing a process rather than a VM. It's definitely a gray
| area... is Heroku serverless?
| aweiland wrote:
| Instead of Twilio you could use SNS and subscribe to it via SMS.
| You would most likely stay within the free tier there too.
| doctorray wrote:
| I just added this in. Not super elegant but can publish to a
| topic with the notifications, then up to the user how they want
| to receive them.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| What is a serverless server?
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| To oversimplify, it's running the Minecraft server software in
| a way that behaves like it's running on a specific server.
|
| But in the background, it's run on a set of Amazon services.
| You don't have to rent a specific server for a given time
| period, like monthly server rental.
|
| You just use Amazon's on-demand services (that use whichever
| server resources are required at the time).
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Thank you for that clarification. Aside from interacting with
| AWS MTurk, I haven't had much experience with Amazon's AWS,
| so it sounded like a joke.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| serverless == ephemeral, on demand servers
| pkilgore wrote:
| Glad someone finished this. I got 90% of the way there using a
| lambda to find spot instances but got too busy to finish.
| 7ewis wrote:
| Have you found that any web crawlers have tried accessing your
| subdomain?
|
| Wondering if services like Google or Shodan may have tried
| querying it and causing your server to turn on?
| doctorray wrote:
| Either the subscription filter or the lambda could be modified
| to only fire based on source IP; not the whole thing but
| perhaps the CIDR of your ISP, so that only you can start it.
| Perhaps it could be done with the route53 geolocation options
| as well.
|
| In the 2 months I've been using this method before deciding to
| write it all down, I've not run into any issues with anyone
| else or any bots triggering the container to start, at least
| not yet...
| Pawka wrote:
| Setting IP whitelisting would help.
| 0xbkt wrote:
| Yet be rather inflexible.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I made a service like this on Observable
|
| https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/minecraft-servers-be
|
| it never really took off so I mothballed it, however, I do use it
| at home for our personal server and it has saved me a ton of
| money! It makes perfect sense as you can have quite a good spec
| machine when you are paying by the hour. you just disconnect the
| disk from the VM and pay for disk storage which is very cheap.
|
| It was based on the following terraform recipe (which I wrote)
|
| https://github.com/futurice/terraform-examples/blob/master/g...
| [deleted]
| 015a wrote:
| > The DNS lookup query is logged in Route 53 on our public hosted
| zone. > CloudWatch forwards the query to a Lambda function. > The
| Lambda function modifies an existing ECS Fargate service to a
| desired task count of 1.
|
| I had never heard of this architecture before; a pretty creative
| way of doing Heroku-like scale-to-zero at nearly no cost on AWS.
|
| > Fargate launches two containers, Minecraft and a watchdog
|
| I'd love to see a cost analysis between running the "watchdog" as
| a Fargate container versus another lambda function. Even having a
| lambda function run once every 5 minutes 24/7 would trigger
| ~15,000 invocations a month, which is in the realm of "near
| Free".
|
| If there was some way to trigger the scale-down event from there,
| it would reduce the expensive part of this setup (Fargate) even
| further. Though, granted; given both containers are packed into
| the same Fargate VM, it would really only mean freeing up some
| additional resources for the Minecraft server.
|
| It looks like the watchdog is simply checking for connections on
| a port, which is probably too low-level to handle with lambda.
| But, an architecture like this could work in a ton of services,
| and if you had e.g. an ALB set up in front of the services, one
| could use the lambda to scan incoming request metrics and scale
| down on that.
| messe wrote:
| > It looks like the watchdog is simply checking for connections
| on a port, which is probably too low-level to handle with
| lambda
|
| Not at all. You could easily check that with any of Lambda's
| supported languages.
| vultour wrote:
| I ran Minecraft on spot instances when we used to play in
| university, complete with automatic terraform+ansible
| provisioning and automatic saves/backups in S3. Never used
| Fargate but I doubt it can beat spot instance pricing. More than
| half my bill was network traffic.
| glecedric wrote:
| Aren't spot instances and Fargate preempt-able at anytime by
| AWS and/or AWS can throttle your instance as the cpu cores are
| shared like in a VPS ?.
|
| Do you just stop playing when it happens ?.
| vultour wrote:
| You can set it to automatically adjust the price so it
| doesn't get preempted. The price used to be essentially at a
| constant minimum (m4.medium/large) during the evening & night
| when we played, so even without that we never got preempted.
| mjlee wrote:
| I'm afraid this isn't completely true. You can still be
| interrupted for capacity issues no matter what your bid is.
| It's quite rare on more common instance types, but becomes
| a problem if you have more than a few GPU or high memory
| type instances.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't think I've ever had my instances taken out from
| under me when I set the max price to the same amount as a
| normal instance.
|
| That said, when we exceed capacity we cannot boot any
| more instances, that's definitely true.
| sharms wrote:
| I thought this was true, but I have had spot instances go
| away even when going above reserved instance pricing.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Just don't plan on playing in Black Friday when every box
| on AWS is tied up by one retailer or another.
| luhn wrote:
| They changed that a few years ago. It used to be the price
| would spike when they needed the capacity, oftentimes going
| higher than On Demand pricing. Now the price adjusts
| gradually, if at all, and they'll terminate instances
| regardless of bid price.
| pkilgore wrote:
| Not op or linked post, but AWS sends a message N minutes
| before it shuts you down.
|
| You just turn that msg into a in-game countdown.
|
| I always wanted to go after an auto-switch style system but
| never got that far.
| elithrar wrote:
| The README points out that Fargate spot instances are an
| option: https://github.com/doctorray117/minecraft-
| ondemand#cost-brea...
| Aissen wrote:
| Concerned about cost overruns? Set up a Billing
| Alert! You can get an email if your bill exceeds a certain
| amount. Set it at $5 maybe?
|
| It's 2021 and the biggest cloud platforms still don't have hard
| limits on spending.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It's by design.
|
| Those guys in finance know there are people whom will pay any
| bill.
|
| When I was younger I would just pay for even mistakes because I
| was concerned with my credit number.
| [deleted]
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| If you mistakenly spend a small (to AWS) amount of money,
| they'll refund it. They're not out to get individuals.
|
| AWS is for businesses and hard limits on spending is a
| liability for their pricing structure. Imagine you run a
| small business built on AWS and you hit your limit -- you're
| basically asking AWS to dismantle your business. They'd have
| to null-route traffic directed to you, shut down your
| servers, delete your data, de-allocate your IP addresses,
| etc. Your business won't be any better off than if you went
| bankrupt from a huge AWS bill.
| trutannus wrote:
| Or Google. When I was a student I forgot about a TPU
| instance and spent over $10K in a single month, on track
| for $100K. Google refunded me since the server was at idle
| for most of that month outside the one hour I used it for.
| corty wrote:
| GCP has budgets that can be easily configured and enforced.
| unoti wrote:
| Azure has quotas that can limit things such as the number of
| VM's you can have running per region. It won't provision more
| vm's than you have in your quota. This helps you, for example,
| avoid automatically provisioning more vm's than you expect.
| These quotas can be edited manually or via API.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I wonder why nobody has a service to receive these billing
| alert emails and react to them by shutting down your AWS
| entities.
| sleepychu wrote:
| Do you think it's an important feature for their paying
| customers? I've worked at places that care a lot about their
| AWS bill but I don't think any of them would have wanted a
| genuine hard stop before they'd do anything about it as a
| result of the soft alerts.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I've used AWS for my personal projects and at work. When I
| started at work, I didn't fully realize that "when an EC2 is
| spun up, you are charged for 1 hour, even if you terminate
| it" - so I accidentally racked up a big bill.
|
| I was thinking it would be useful if Organizations could pre
| authorize users at $X before preventing them from doing more
| - of course the better solution is to manage releases through
| a pipeline that checks for stuff created and code scanning
| and... whatever
|
| In the end, we use cost monitoring, but no AWS billing alerts
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Do you think it 's an important feature for their paying
| customers?_
|
| I think it is.
|
| A few jobs ago, the boss of my boss got fired for a cloud
| service overage. Not a huge amount; the number on the
| grapevine was around $10,000. But it was enough.
|
| For many (numerically "most," probably) companies, the IT
| department is a black box to upper management, and any
| unexpected budget overages are a serious problem.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Use a disposable credit card (like lastcard or privacy) and set
| the limit to $5. Add it to your account, and the max they can
| charge is $5. If they let you run past it, the billing will
| fail, and if they don't shut it off it's on their dime.
|
| To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say to
| you: take it in your favor for once. For every 100 clients aws
| bills unexpectedly and with no controls in place to mitigate,
| you can be the 1 who gets a free month of service. They will
| not pursue you for $5. Imagine making the argument for welfare
| on a company that is worth a trillion dollars.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say
| to you: take it in your favor for once.
|
| The rationale against doing this is as much practical as it
| is moral --- unless you're just doing this once for a single
| month and don't care if your account gets banned. AWS isn't
| like an auto-renewing subscription, where if the card
| declines, your service is cut off. They won't charge the card
| with a $5 limit until the end of the billing period. If you
| rack up more than $5 in charges in a billing period, you will
| be in debt to Amazon. They will certainly ban your account,
| so you'd have to make a new throwaway account with a new
| disposable CC each month.
| tgtweak wrote:
| You'd be humbled (perhaps not) by how little human capital
| gets assigned to review and correct anything under
| 5-figures at AWS. The account gets put into overdue and the
| services stay paused, you get an email every so often (if
| you even put in a valid email). Pretending they have a
| crack team of hundreds of analysts sitting there waiting to
| ban every account associated to an IP for $5 is pretty
| farcical. I have several 6-figure AWS accounts at present,
| and I can barely get ahold of a human being when there are
| issues related to wire payments not being applied to an
| account, let alone imagine they'd have anyone worrying
| about this beyond putting a dev on it to set up an ignore
| filter on such accounts. They have a manual process to
| allow any accounts to spend above $2000 or $5000 (I can't
| remember) where you fill out a credit application and they
| vet you to see if you are indeed good for it before
| allowing you to provision further. If you default on that,
| they will carefully weight the cost of collecting you or
| even reporting it to a credit bureau vs the amount due.
|
| Not advocating for mass fraud here, or even petty fraud,
| just making it a bit more fair to those who have 0
| provisions in the platform to prevent involuntary
| overspending.
| zhynn wrote:
| I have been very happy with privacy.com for this very
| purpose.
| aaronjl wrote:
| The only problem is that they'll let you go negative for
| awhile before they shut you off. Then they won't let you use
| any services until you pay your balance. So unless you're
| willing to make a new account each time you go over your $5
| max, you'll still be paying for the extra usage
| dangus wrote:
| This is a good way to just get banned until you pay.
|
| AWS bills work a lot like postpaid phone bills. When you use
| the service you agree to pay the bill for usage.
|
| Your suggestion is kind of like saying "If your card declines
| you don't have to pay for your meal." Not really true.
|
| In my experience AWS support has been good about reversing
| accidental/fraudulent usage charges and helping to prevent
| them in the future.
| kobalsky wrote:
| > Imagine making the argument for welfare on a company that
| is worth a trillion dollars
|
| You are not doing delivering some sort of poetic justice, you
| are just showing your lack of self-preservation instinct. For
| _your own_ welfare, just don 't poke the bear. You don't
| wanna get blacklisted for doing some dumb crap that will come
| bite you in the ass someday.
|
| There are enough stories running around of people getting
| their job accounts banned by association for pulling idiotic
| stunts like these, and we don't know what crap Amazon will be
| running in the future.
| hughrr wrote:
| Yeah. By the time you have woken up and read your billing alert
| email it's too late.
|
| However the reason it doesn't exist I suspect is twofold.
| Firstly because it is bad business. All the cloud providers
| make a lot of money from mistakes and small things sapping
| cash. Secondly it's hard to rationalise what to do when the
| budget runs out. What do they nuke?
| woofcat wrote:
| Would it be that hard to build some cost overrun plans?
|
| If threshold (x) hit then do:
|
| - Email me
|
| - Stop Servers XYZ
|
| - Leave Servers ABC running.
|
| If threshold (y) hit then do:
|
| - Email me / Call me
|
| - Shut everything down.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I came here to basically say something like this: if
| there's a hard limit, your business will basically shut
| down entirely. It's hard (impossible) for cloud providers
| to automagically shut down services based on each
| customer's priorities.
|
| I don't think there's a magical solution to this. There
| might be a company that sets a $1K USD/month limit, forgets
| about it, and suddenly the cloud provider shuts down
| everything a year later, while "everyone" is unavailable or
| something like that.
|
| There are so many scenarios, and I honestly feel that the
| cloud providers have decided on the most fool-proof
| solution both for them and their clients.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Shared hosting providers from the late 90s onward typically
| had systems like this standard.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they didn't have to potentially call as
| many clients as today. :)
| thak788 wrote:
| If your talking about crappanel exceeded bandwidth
| suspension page it wasn't realltime, can't remember if
| default was 1hr,6hr, 24 though
| lostcolony wrote:
| Even if not realtime, it sounds like a better option than
| AWS' current "not supported at all; you'll have to
| manually shut things down if costs overrun".
| partisan wrote:
| Both AWS and shared hosting providers run on a "F you.
| Pay me!" model. The difference is that small hosting
| resellers knew they couldn't collect on debts while
| Amazon knows it can.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Shut everything down
|
| Ok. But the Auto Scaling Groups are free - so I can keep
| that on, right? Oh, look! They just launched more EV2s, how
| convenient. Should I back these up to S3? With CRR enabled?
|
| Tee hee hee
| Jach wrote:
| AWS sorta has something like this already with CloudWatch,
| but it'd be nice if it was simpler and immediate instead of
| reactive. I just run a little reserved EC2 instance so my
| main billing risks are excessive data out or forgetting to
| renew a reservation and reverting to by-the-hour billing.
| So that I don't worry about it much I have three alarms
| that notify me if either "estimated charges > $x for 1
| datapoints within 6 hours", or there's "anomalous"
| NetworkOut over a day, or "there's more than X total
| NetworkOut over a day", and another alarm that's
| "NetworkOut > Y for 1 datapoint within 15 minutes" that
| notifies me and shuts the instance down. I'd like to have a
| hard cap of "my instantaneous billing running total for the
| month, not my 'estimate', has exceeded $x, shut everything
| down" but what's there is something.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I use AWS for a very small side project. I used about $10
| back in July, and I don't expect any more costs for
| several months (aside from S3 hosting).
|
| It would be really nice if I could preload $100 into the
| account and remove my credit card. I don't have ANYTHING
| sensitive behind my username and password- except my CC #
|
| I know they are never going to implement this because I'm
| small potatoes, but it would be nice
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Buy a prepaid cc.
|
| $7.00 for up to $500
| mwarkentin wrote:
| I think they just added this:
| https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-
| allow...
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| Do they say that you won't go over the prepaid amount? I
| can't see that in the pages that I've read, but maybe I
| missed it.
| thak788 wrote:
| Bin checks will usually disallow prepaid cards to reply
| below
| nybble41 wrote:
| For data out I have some alerts set similar to yours to
| shut down the instance if NetworkOut becomes unusually
| high--over three different time scales. Since the alerts
| are delayed, though, I also set up traffic shaping rules
| in the VM to throttle the NetworkOut to something
| reasonable so that it doesn't incur a huge bill before
| the first alert triggers. Officially the VMs have 5 Gbps
| network links; at that rate you can accumulate quite a
| large bill in a very short time if the VM starts
| saturating the link.
| chillfox wrote:
| No, it's not hard to figure out what to do when the budget
| runs out. Preserve data and shut everything else down.
|
| So switch off all VMs, but don't delete the disks. Disable S3
| read/write, but don't delete the data. Etc...
| gitfan86 wrote:
| That scenario implies that someone has made a mistake. They
| forgot to turn off a service or turned on a service by
| accident. How does AWS know that the billing cutoff wasn't
| the accident? Maybe I accidently set a $20 cutoff during
| building my MVP instead of $200, but now that I have a paying
| customer I'm going to hit $100/month. AWS could disable my
| very first customer because I forgot to fix my billing
| setting.
|
| Doing nothing is generally better from a legal liability
| point of view. The customer should be liable for turning
| services on and off.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| There's a third reason, which I suspect is the biggest. The
| billing is not real-time, and it's hard to make it even
| nearly so, especially in such a complex and heavily
| distributed infrastructure like AWS.
| sltkr wrote:
| I think the solution would be to allow customers to set
| hard limits, so they at least have an upper bound on their
| monthly spend, while still being charged on their actual
| usage (in a nonrealtime fashion).
|
| This also solves the problem of "what to cut". If I hit my
| bandwidth limit AWS simply stops routing requests to my
| servers, if I hit my CPU limit AWS should throttle me, etc.
| pantulis wrote:
| Billing is very tricky from the metering to the final PDF
| bill which includes taxes, promotions and whatnot. So this
| is hard if you want to put limits on a certain dollar
| amount. You could also put hard stops on resource usage
| (say, no more than 500 CPU/hr/month)
| unilynx wrote:
| Then allow to set a pre tax pre promotion limit?
|
| Besides, AWS already complicates things way too much by
| handling VAT like other billable items instead of just
| adding it at the final step like any sane company would
| arthurcolle wrote:
| This feels (no disrespect to you) like a huge cop out. How
| many more small, "let's hack this together and hope for the
| best" projects are they missing out on because developers
| feel uncomfortable with the black box that is AWS billing?
| I suspect it would be a significant number, believe it or
| not.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| They have realtime insights into how much read/write
| capacity or IOPS happens on the majority of their services.
| Their throttling has millisecond resolution. They have no
| problem giving you realtime insight into when you need to
| push the magic button to spend more money and increase your
| write/read capacities. If billing isn't realtime, it's due
| to sheer laziness or malfeasance (plausible deniability, my
| guess), because the data is there.
| anonymousab wrote:
| I asked about this a few years ago. The answer I was
| given by various friends throughout AWS was consistently
| that of "oh, our customers don't want that" for whatever
| that's worth.
| lostcolony wrote:
| This is probably technically accurate. After all, I'm
| sure Amazon, as any business, weights customer voices by
| the amount of spend. The people spending millions don't
| want a hard stop (i.e., kill our production services when
| we hit a certain amount of spend); the only people who
| want it are the people spending comparatively small
| amounts, pre-revenue startups, individuals, etc.
|
| This is an example where being data driven to the
| exclusion of all else can hurt a company; I suspect
| having this feature would pay dividends down the road (by
| being the first to provide a safety net for a startup
| with a fixed budget that doesn't have production
| workloads yet you offer a competitive advantage between
| cloud providers), but the effect is completely impossible
| to predict or track currently since it doesn't have an
| immediate impact on revenue or the satisfaction of large,
| paying customers.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| While I hate it, I agree with this in that in most
| settings heads will roll if your main moneymaking service
| is offline because of a billing snag.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Pro-tip: "the data is there" doesn't mean it's cheap to
| use.
|
| There's a very simple explanation for this; realtime
| billing would increase the cost of the product they sell
| to create something most people don't need.
| Closi wrote:
| If you can't accurately tell someone how much they have
| spent, how can you expect them to stop before it's too
| late?
|
| If you can tell, then you can set a limit.
|
| Besides, if they can trigger alerts at a particular spend
| then they should be able to create a limit.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Besides, if they can trigger alerts at a particular
| spend then they should be able to create a limit.
|
| That's not really true. The alerts happen when the
| billing is re-calculated (periodically) and you've exceed
| a predefined, not when you hit that exact threshold.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monit
| ori...
|
| >When you enable the monitoring of estimated charges for
| your AWS account, the estimated charges are calculated
| and sent several times daily to CloudWatch as metric
| data.
|
| Real time billing is actually a Hard Problem to solve.
| Closi wrote:
| Well stop the service on that periodic cycle then if it's
| over the limit?
|
| Non-realtime limits are better than no limits at all.
| Besides the cloudwatch documentation seems to suggest
| it's reporting on a 5 minute frequency for most of AWS.
| mcny wrote:
| > Real time billing is actually a Hard Problem to solve.
|
| I refuse to believe there is no workaround. I can
| understand it is not easy to fix for corporations who
| need AWS to make money but that is not the use case for
| students.
|
| If it were, Azure for students couldn't exist. Signing up
| for Azure for students does not require a credit card so
| they must have figured out a way to prevent / stop the
| bleeding?
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/
| eddieroger wrote:
| You don't get to be the biggest by not charging people. They
| probably make more off accidental billing than the people who
| contest those accidents, so it's worthwhile. That's why
| Columbia House was so hard to cancel back in the day - it
| wasn't the $0.01 CD where they made the money, but on the
| monthly fees that were way more than the cost of one CD.
| imglorp wrote:
| It was the same deal for vinyl before that! Not a bad deal if
| you bought your minimum and cancelled.
| reaperducer wrote:
| And books before the vinyl.
|
| Fortunately, I never got sucked into the 8-track club.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| I don't think it has anything to do with wanting to collect
| money from accidents. That's not very reliable revenue
| anyways. That's just an unfortunate side effect for us plebs.
|
| The real reason is that if you give companies a budget
| feature, they will inevitably, you know, use it. They'll set
| a budget that seems 'reasonable', and then freak out when
| everything turns off when it's exceeded, and then go raise it
| a little bit, and repeat the cycle.
|
| Compare that to now where every place I've ever worked
| basically seems to forget that cloud hosting costs even
| exist, based on how much most companies balk at paying for
| simple SaaS tools for developers but will happily let the
| hosting costs grow to astronomical amounts. They're happy to
| do it cause they just see a line item and accept it. If you
| give them budgets, that won't happen any more.
| eddieroger wrote:
| >I don't think it has anything to do with wanting to
| collect money from accidents. That's not very reliable
| revenue anyways.
|
| It's worked well enough for the entire fitness industry
| forever. No reason it can't work here as well, and at scale
| I'm sure it's pretty profitable. You're right, too, that
| we'd use it, but I think this is a situation where we can
| both be right.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _That 's not very reliable revenue anyways._
|
| At the scale of Joe's Chicken Shack, accidental revenue is
| not reliable. But at the scale of a Google or an Amazon,
| while it will fluctuate month to month, a certain minimum
| revenue stream should be statistically predictable.
| aliswe wrote:
| Not that easy to do. I don't think any major users are
| requesting this, and what to do when you go over the limit?
| Start deleting resources automatically? What about the data?
| Backups?
|
| It's just not that relevant ...
| StratusBen wrote:
| [Disclosure] I'm Co-Founder and CEO of a company named
| http://vantage.sh/ that helps developers track and reduce cloud
| costs - I also previously worked at both AWS and DigitalOcean.
|
| We hear about this all the time from AWS customers and its a
| large reason why people connect their account to Vantage which
| will help alert you if costs change intra-month. The first
| $2,500 in AWS costs per month are tracked for free so I thought
| I'd mention this here for potentially being helpful to the
| community.
|
| If you don't want to remember to set up billing alerts, we
| provide basically a turn-key experience around this that takes
| less than a few minutes to setup: http://vantage.sh/
| thak788 wrote:
| What type of iam perms does this require?
| StratusBen wrote:
| When you sign up and verify your email you will see the
| provided CloudFormation template found here for auditing of
| IAM permissions: https://vantage-
| public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat...
|
| The list of permissions is a whittled down version of
| what's available in the AWS managed policy of
| "ReadOnlyAccess" and doesn't allow us to do things like
| read from S3 Buckets or read from RDS instances. Basically
| just List/Describe actions.
|
| IAM permissions are written about more here in our
| documentation and are ultimately handled gracefully if you
| want to remove some. For example, if you just want to hand
| Vantage access to billing, S3 and EC2, it will do the job
| as best it can with just those permissions:
| https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/
|
| Finally, here's a blog post on our cross account IAM setup:
| https://www.vantage.sh/blog/how-vantage-uses-cross-
| account-i...
| N00bN00b wrote:
| You can just deploy your own solution. And that one can be
| selective, which is probably preferable anyway.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ce/get-cost...
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I'm sure it's a terrible idea for some reason, but I love the
| idea of setting up a service with a wallet that pays for
| itself. Anyone can add funds to the wallet. As long as the
| wallet has funds, the service keeps running. I especially love
| the idea of the provider (AWS, GCE, Azue, whatever) setting up
| the wallet, and guaranteeing there's no way to withdraw from
| the wallet, so you know the funds you deposit really do go to
| funding that service. Then, give the service a way to see which
| account has deposited funds, so they can credit you for funds
| you deposited... I mean, I would just love to see more services
| running "self-funding" like this.
| ricardbejarano wrote:
| BunnyCDN works like that.
|
| I prefer to be billed whatever it costs but have my service
| up all the time.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The users who actually pay AWS decent money or are likely to
| pay AWS decent money in the future don't ask for this afaik.
| People paying $5/month for AWS aren't AWS's target audience and
| likely contribute negligible revenue to AWS.
|
| People do ask for alerting and monitoring but that's not a hard
| stop.
|
| Then you get complex issues such as S3 and EBS. As long as
| there is data you will keep paying so what do you do? Have a
| hard limit but not really since it doesn't cover them? Delete
| people's data?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >It's 2021 and the biggest cloud platforms still don't have
| hard limits on spending.
|
| Look... just be happy that they made it PAINFULLY obvious when
| you make S3 buckets public
| mdaniel wrote:
| Have you visited their S3 console recently? It's gotten
| pretty striking visual markers now for Public visibility. I
| don't have a screenshot handy, but thought I'd mention it
| [deleted]
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