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DigitalOcean App Platform

(pages.news.digitalocean.com)
646 points digianarchist | 1 comments | 06 Oct 20 14:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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onion2k ◴[06 Oct 20 15:38 UTC] No.24698869[source]▶
Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills.

I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that. I want something that stops that happening.

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phildougherty ◴[06 Oct 20 15:43 UTC] No.24698927[source]▶
Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.
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onion2k ◴[06 Oct 20 15:50 UTC] No.24699014[source]▶
My point is that alerts aren't really enough. If I'm asleep or on a plane or something then it could be many hours before I even see an alert, by which time it's probably too late. I'd prefer to be able to set up rules beforehand that prevent an unforeseen bill.

If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing site claims. A warning isn't quite the same as prevention.

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phildougherty ◴[06 Oct 20 15:57 UTC] No.24699110[source]▶
Sorry, I think I misunderstood what you were saying there. Could you clarify a bit more about what kind of functionality you'd prefer we support in the scenario you described? A large influx of traffic hits your application while you are unavailable to handle it. If you do not have autoscaling enabled, your application performance could suffer, if you do have it enabled your bill could grow out of bounds. We do plan to let you set min and max bounds for autoscaling once it is implemented. Thanks for your help!
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1. jacurtis ◴[06 Oct 20 16:10 UTC] No.24699275{4}[source]▶
I think he is simply requesting threshold limits. So for example you could set a threshold of 2 - 5 nodes/droplets. This way you will always have at least 2 nodes running, even with zero traffic, because that is the minimum you requested. Likewise the upper bound limit of 5 nodes/droplets would limit the maximum nodes that the service would generate.

So it autoscales up until it hits the maximum threshold and stops. Yes, if the app needed more resources than this, due to a spike in traffic, than performance would obviously suffer. But depending on the budget and needs of the project this might be the preferred outcome over incurring unexpectedly high server costs that you are not prepared to handle.