[HN Gopher] Be careful what you test or deploy to Vercel
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Be careful what you test or deploy to Vercel
Author : sergiotapia
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-04-06 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| antonvs wrote:
| There's a reason that services like AWS and GCP tend to be fairly
| forgiving of billing due to legitimate mistakes by first-time
| users (and others).
|
| And that reason is perfectly summarized by this post: anyone
| reading this post is likely to put Vercel on a mental do-not-use
| list.
|
| This is also the reason that cloud providers tend to have default
| quotas that, among other things, limit runaway usage.
|
| Admittedly without knowing much about it, it sounds like Vercel
| may be pretty immature as a business.
|
| Edit: after commenting I saw the Vercel response. I'm leaving my
| comment up because that response still seems to focus on a refund
| being conditional on some technical justification. That's how
| engineers tend to think. It's not how successful businesspeople
| need to think. It seems like both the refund policy and
| quota/limit management may need to be reviewed.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately I had a similar experience back when Vercel
| was Now. It seems like the optimal strategy is to stick with
| their free plan until you really need the paid features, then
| monitor it like a snake stalking a mouse.
|
| The flip side is that they've been rock solid for years on their
| free plan. Super reliable and nothing but positive things to say
| about that tier.
|
| Kinda surprising they wouldn't forgive the $3k bill. That's the
| cost of a nice MacBook Pro for a runaway experiment. You'd expect
| this sort of thing in ML training, not webdev...
| nikita wrote:
| https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1644099739959590912?s=46&t...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Ah, wonderful. Happy they made the right business decision
| and refunded everything.
| Rauchg wrote:
| Re-posting my Twitter update[1] here:
|
| We've concluded our analysis.
|
| 1. We're refunding the overages
|
| 2. We identified the root cause
|
| The root cause is that the Astro bundle handed to the deployment
| process is monolithic. There was a top-level `await` for an RSS
| endpoint which called an API with `fetch`. The issue is that
| these two (and the rest of the app) were bundled together!
|
| Therefore, any time the function was invoked, that top-level
| `await` was running for _all_ endpoints. It never yielded. And it
| 's fully autonomous, which means it'd keep running regardless of
| even a browser being open once the chain reaction started.
|
| This is a Swiss Cheese[2] kind of failure. It required the top
| level await, the monolithic bundle, and the RSS function using
| `fetch` (i.e.: over the network) rather than `import`-ing the
| data layer API directly.
|
| Most importantly, what we're doing: we are going to deploy a fix
| to ensure this doesn't happen again, across frameworks. I really
| appreciate Mike raising this and hopping on a zoom call with me
| while our team investigated.
|
| As an addendum for HN: we're continuing to refine the tools and
| patterns to best "harness" the practically-infinite ability for
| Serverless and Edge functions to scale horizontally. It's an
| awesome property, but it's taught us valuable lessons. We've come
| a long way in adding guardrails and alerts, and this will be
| another value-added protection that future customers will enjoy.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1644099739959590912
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Good update. Good refund. Well handled.
| josevalerio wrote:
| Awesome response, handled well!
|
| You guys are always on top of things community wise, especially
| Lee Robinson in any related thread :')
| josevalerio wrote:
| I wonder what the aversion is to using a plain old server / vps.
| It's really not that difficult to deploy nowadays [0][1][2][3]
| and I'd rather get an $8 bill every month as insurance than ever
| worry about shit like OP just went through. It'll probably be
| more performant anyway due to cold starts and "edge" still having
| to hit us-east-1 for data.. cache your static files with Cloud
| Flare/Front. People are always surprised by how much traffic a
| single VPS can take[4] and believe it all has to be serverless to
| be web scale. I believe HN still runs on a single core or
| something.
|
| There's a ton of places to get cloud credits as well, too many to
| link, so just Bing(tm) it
|
| [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/v2/docs/aws-cdk-
| lib.aws_...
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/
|
| [2] https://cloud.google.com/run
|
| [3] https://render.com/
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676186
| impulser_ wrote:
| I have never used functions before, but this seems like this is
| very expensive compared it every other cloud service provided
| like Digitalocean, AWS, GCP, and Azure.
|
| I might be way off, but this would cost under $100 on all of them
| and you would most likely get a refund if you talked to support.
|
| So why is Vercel so expensive? Do they not have a pricing limits
| that you can set? Seems like a very bad idea to run functions
| that are cost per usage on a service that has no way for you to
| set limits on usage.
| flockonus wrote:
| After learning about this I will stay away until they implement
| obvious limits on usage. Not cool to have to appeal for public
| viral posting to waive an unfair bill.
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I am glad the issue was resolved for OP. I've had a great
| experience with Vercel and never had anything of this sort happen
| to me, fingers crossed I don't run into it any time soon :D
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Can you still create an AWS lambda triggered by S3 event
| notifications that writes to the same bucket?
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(page generated 2023-04-06 23:01 UTC)