Serverless Horrors - Hacker News

Posted by operator-name 6 days ago

Serverless Horrors(serverlesshorrors.com)

618 points | 484 commentspage 3

ghost_co 5 days ago|

Does anyone heard a success stories from cloud usage?

Really, we(they) in the company decided to move in cloud everything from on-prem, it should save costs say them.

But, as result you anyway need DevOps, some complications with development, local environments and not only.

For not short career I faced some good examples, but it's more about unique situations, not a rule and a lot companies continue pay a lot for some small bunch of utility.

Maybe I'm wrong, but such topics about this hell heard a lot of timesand only on some conference: success stories (because they should say: success)

paseante 6 days ago||

Yeah I also left my website hosted on Google Cloud because costs popped from everywhere, and there is basically no built-in functionality to limit them. So I didn't really slept relaxed (I actually slept great, but I hope you get the point) knowing that a bug could cost me... who knows how much. Actually, as the website of OP says, for spending control you have budget notifications and with that you can disable the billing for all the project altogether through some API call or something, I don't remember exactly, that is all there is. But still it looks like this functionality is just not there.

mortsnort 6 days ago|

You can write Google cloud functions to disable your credit card when certain thresholds are met pretty easily, but it's unethical that this isn't just a toggle somewhere in settings.

Cpoll 6 days ago||

Does that actually stop the spend immediately? If not, you're still on the hook for the bill. I suppose you can walk away and let them try to come after you, but that wouldn't work for a company.

prisenco 6 days ago||

This is why when I contract for an early stage startup, I pose the question:

"What if your app went viral and you woke to a $20k cloud bill? $50k? $80k?"

If the answer is anything less than "Hell yeah, we'll throw it on a credit card and hit up investors with a growth chart" then I suggest a basic vps setup with a fixed cost that simply stops responding instead.

There is such a thing as getting killed by success and while it's possible to negotiate with AWS or Google to reduce a surprise bill, there's no guarantee and it's a lot to throw on a startup's already overwhelming plate.

The cloud made scaling easier in ways, but a simple vps is so wildly overpowered compared to 15 years ago, a lot of startups can go far with a handful of digitalocean droplets.

jamil7 6 days ago||

Don’t most of these services have config options to protect against doing this? I haven’t used most of these services but it running up a bill during traffic spikes but not going down seems like it’s working as intended?

swiftcoder 6 days ago||

Nope, basically none of these services have a way to set a hard budget. They let you configure budget warnings, but it’s generally up to you to login and actually shut down everything to prevent from being billed for overages (or you have to build your own automation - but the billing alerts may not be reliable)

hxtk 6 days ago||

I know AWS in particular does not because they do not increment the bill for every request. I don't know exactly how they calculate billing, but based on what I do know about it, I imagine it as a MapReduce job that runs on Lambda logs every so often to calculate what to bill each user for the preceding time interval.

That billing strategy makes it impossible to prevent cost overruns because by the time the system knows your account exceeded the budget you set, the system has already given out $20k worth of gigabyte-seconds of RAM to serve requests.

I think most other serverless providers work the same way. In practice, you would prevent such high traffic spikes with rate limiting in your AWS API Gateway or equivalent to limit the amount of cost you could accumulate in the time it takes you to receive a notification and decide on a course of action.

wg002 6 days ago||

This site is a bit dated. I remember in response to this Vercel added a way to pause your projects when hitting a spend limit. I enabled it for my account.

Still, it made me question why I'm not using a VPS.

aurareturn 6 days ago|

Vercel used to be called Zeit. They had a server product called Now that gave you 10 1CPU/1GPU instances for $10/month (or $20 I forgot). It was the best deal.

When Vercel switched everything to serverless, it all became pretty terrible. You need 3rd party services for simple things like DB connection pooling, websockets, cron jobs, simple queue, etc because those things aren’t compatible with serverless. Not to mention cold starts. Just a few weeks ago, I tried to build an API on Next.js+Vercel and get random timeouts due to cold start issues.

Vercel made it easier to build and deploy static websites. But really, why are you using Next.js for static websites? Wordpress works fine. Anything works fine. Serverless makes it drastically harder to build a full app with a back end.

pjmlp 6 days ago||

Serverless is the most common deployment on MACH projects.

Because when everything is a bunch of SaaS Lego bricks, serverless is all one needs for integration logic, and some backend like logic.

Add to it that many SaaS vendors in CMS and ecommerce space have special partner deals with Vercel and Nelify.

https://macharchitecture.com/

delduca 6 days ago||

Couple years ago I was charged in USD 4K on Google Cloud after trying recursive cloud functions.

I told them that was a mistake and they forgot the debit, they just asked to no do again.

CivBase 6 days ago||

I can't imagine hosting a small-time project on rented infrastructure without some kind of mechanism to terminate it once costs exceed a reasonable threshold.

dang 5 days ago||

Related. Others?

Single day Firebase bill for $100k - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43884892 - May 2025 (14 comments)

Serverless Horrors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532754 - Feb 2024 (169 comments)

nromiun 5 days ago|

I was also too careless with AWS when I was a beginner with no deployment experience and I am very lucky that I did not push a wrong button.

All these stories of bill forgiveness reminds me of survivorship bias. Does this happens to everyone that reaches out to support or just the ones that get enough traction on social media? I am pretty sure there is no official policy from AWS, GCP or Azure.

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