Category: Finances

I hate banking and I hate bills. Not because it’s money going out – I can cope with that – it just gives me anxiety. I am forever doomed to be a programmer (or possibly a novelist) because I hate thinking about money and I hate doing banking. This extends even to the email from AWS about the bills giving me anxiety. That’s why I had 3 unread ones in my mailbox until today, and they are issued monthly.

Despite my personal issues, the bills were great news, as illustrated in drop in the graph above. The database continues to cost a fixed amount (variations are due to varying numbers of days in the month), and the other costs are all dropping. I could probably do even more about the EC2 costs now that I have the lambdas sorted, but I feel that I should get some functionality working on the site, for a change.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Just before New Year I bought myself Assassin’s Creed: Origins for the PS4, and oh my goodness I have been playing a lot of that. Today I’m making some time to look at Extended Stats, before I finish saving Cleopatra.

In the absence of having anything exciting to say, here’s the news on the latest bill. It’s still higher than I want, but it shows promise.

The great news is that Lambda costs are zero. Lambdas do a lot of work on the site, so getting them for free is good. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) costs are high, but that includes the costs for Elastic Beanstalk that I blogged about previously and will be much lower since I replaced that with a simple virtual machine.

The CloudWatch charge is another surprise – my graph of all of the lambdas being invoked started costing me money because there was too much stuff on it.

In other news, the database performance gets smoother and smoother, which is a great thing.

I’m continuing to try to get the login button to work properly. It’s very hard to test! I guess I should start adding some functionality some time soon.

 

One of the thrilling things about cloud computing is sticker shock. It’s OK once you’ve established your pattern of usage and know roughly how much you’ll pay each month, but for an experimenter like me, strange things can happen. Like that time last year I tried something out, it didn’t work, then a month later I got a bill for $40 because I hadn’t deleted a thing and I didn’t even know what the thing did. So it was that this month I was a bit worried, as the site had been running somewhat properly for a few weeks.

So after that stress, $12 is good news! It suggests that I’m doing something right and that I can keep this up.

I’ll explain what the bits are. RDS is Relational Database Service – the database. AWS does automatic backups and so on – we tried it at work the other day, it’s pretty nice – so for that money they’re keeping our data safe. EC2 is the virtual computer that the blog runs on. It’s a tiny one, so it could be free, but I think I used up my quota of free EC2s already. Route 53 is the DNS (Dynamic Name Service),  i.e. the bit that tells the world where stats.drfriendless.com, extstats.drfriendless.com, api.drfriendless.com and blog.drfriendless.com are – they are all different computers, if they exist at all. Data transfer is costs for downloading from BGG. 4c seems reasonable. Of the “other” 5c, 4c is for S3 (Something Simple Storage) which is like a big hard drive, and 1c is for API Gateway, which is the bit that implements api.drfriendless.com by turning API requests into calls to lambdas.

There’s no charge for Lambdas, as I seem to be under the free limit still. When I get more stuff going I might have to pay 20c for that. However that is where I’ve put most of my effort recently – trying to keep them small, and trying to make them do their job and not run uselessly.

I love it when a plan comes together.