- Published on
CDN's Impact on Serverless Computing
- Authors
- Name
- Alex Lee
- @alexjoelee
The Traffic Peak
You've finally made it to the front page of Hacker News and your site is getting more clicks than it's ever had - nice! Folks are signing up and simply cannot get enough of your sick new web app. You check your PaaS control panel and see that your serverless compute is scaling effortlessly. As you watch your revenue graphs climbing, a curious e-mail lands in your inbox.
"Hi there, we're writing to let you know that your NoServer account has consumed over 80% of it's available quota." heck
The Unexpected Cost of Bandwidth
Now it's time to upgrade, but your ultra-convenient and stylish, lavlishly-funded serverless provider is charging a premium for bandwidth. Like, a hefty premium... 0.40 per gigabyte (GB). On average, that's over $200 per terabyte (TB)! What's worse is that cost varies depending on where your users are.
Why?!
The entire point of serverless is to provide a layer of abstraction. You, the developer, don't need to worry about hosting at all, and in exchange, you will pay premium prices.
The (somehow) Billable DDoS Attack
While more and more providers move to add DDoS protection to their services, some are still in the middle of that process and find themselves with a unique issue: Not knowing what traffic is legitimate and what traffic is malicious. At least, it seems to be a major issue when it comes to billing. While they may be able to classify the traffic as a DDoS attack, they may still decide to bill you for it, which could land you on the hook for lots of money. More likely, you'll be able to resolve the issue without paying with some back-and-forth with the providers support team.
Due to the very nature of how a CDN works and how most are implemented, all of your traffic is filtered by the CDN provider before it lands at your host. Most CDNs provide excellent DDoS detection and protection, and while some do not charge for DDoS traffic, others charge premium rates during attacks.
Combining traditional CDN and serverless
Traditional CDNs have been around for decades and have competed on features and price the entire time. Many CDNs are able to charge a simple flat rate per GB globally, rather than different rates in different areas. I'm sure you're starting to get the picture.
Combining a CDN platform that caches data with your serverless applications is a proven way to save money on bandwidth fees at the expense of managing more than one service. At Skip2, our bandwidth fees are as low as $0.02/GB globally. Some CDNs are completely free!