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Cake day: November 15th, 2023

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  • But the estimation is with each NC instance with half a CPU and 1GB of memory. This is a super conservative estimation, that doesn’t include anything besides a tiny Fargate deployment and Aurora instances.

    Edit: fargate ($40/month), the tiniest Aurora instances at 20% utilization and with merely 50GB storage ($120/month). Missing s3, which will easily cost $50 in storage and transfer (for only a few TB), ALBs and network traffic, especially outbound (easily $50-100 depending on volumes).

    This basic solution’s real cost is already between $150 and $300/month. I don’t know NC enough to understand volumes on DBs and all usage, but I assume that it’s going to be lots of data in and out (backups, media, etc.). —edit—

    For a heavily used NC instance (assuming a company offering it as a service), the cost is going to become massive pretty fast.

    Also, as I side note, if a company is offering NC as a service, but doesn’t manage a single piece of NC deployment… What is the company product? And most importantly, how are they going to make money when AWS is going to eat a linearly scalable chunk of their revenue forever?


  • Well yeah, wouldn’t break the bank, but a conservative cost estimate (without considering network costs, for example, quite relevant for a data intensive app) would bring this setup to about $40/month. That is about 5 times more expensive than a VPC with 4x the resources.

    OP said this is some sort of “enterprise self-hosting” solution, which I guess then kind of makes sense. For a company providing nextcloud as a service I would never vendor lock myself and let AWS take a huge chunk of my revenue forever, but I can imagine folks have different opinions.


  • In that case, Pulumi permissions are too broad IMHO for what it has to do, an enterprise should adhere to least privilege. Likewise, as I wrote in another comment, the egress security groups are unclear to me (why any traffic at all is needed?) and the image consumed should be pinned to a digest. Or better yet, should be coming from a private enterprise registry, ideally with an attestation that can be verified at runtime.

    I am not sure ECS Fargate makes sense vs an ec2 instance to run the workload. This setup alone will cost about $30/month assuming half a vCPU per replica with Fargate, plus about $12 for the memory (1GB/task). 2xt2.micro could be run for ~$20 without even considering reservation discounts etc. Obviously the gap will become even larger at scale, which I suppose might be very interesting for an enterprise.



  • Oh yeah, I am aware. Mostly here I would question the idea to have multi-AZ redundancy and using a manage service for DB (which indeed is expensive). All of this when a 5$ VPS could host the same (maybe still using s3 for storage) and accept the few hours downtime in the rare event your VPS explodes and you need to restore it from a backup.

    So from my PoV this is absolutely overkill but I concede that it depends a lot on the requirements. I can’t ever imagine having requirements so tight that need such infra to run (in fact, I think not even most businesses have these requirements, I have written on the topic at https://loudwhisper.me/blog/hating-clouds/) for my personal stuff…


  • Everyone is free to pick their poison, but I have to ask…why? What is the target audience here? This is a massively overkill architecture IMHO. Not to talk about the fact you now need 3 managed services (fargate, s3 and aurora at least) for a single self hosted tool, and that is being generous (not counting cloudwatch, ALBs, etc.).

    • Why do you need security groups to allow egress anywhere (or, at all)?
    • I would pin the image to a digest, rather than using latest.
    • what is the average monthly cost for this infra for you?