I’ve been following a bit of Internet Of Things drama because a company Cease & Desisted a developer who was polling their API for an unofficial Home Assistant Integration.
Thankfully, it looks like the company is now engaging with the Developer and The Home Assistant team, so maybe it can be resolved.
But one of the recurring comments initially was “if they’re saying it costs too much money, they should use a cheaper host than AWS”
Disclosure, my career is helping companies use the right bits of AWS well, and for all my discomfort at the centralisation of the internet into the Hyperscalers – the ability to deploy a website that costs nothing if nobody uses it, yet scales to match demand, is pretty compelling.
“What Context do you mean Gareth?”
Backing up a second, this integration polls the endpoint pretty aggressively, and so could be causing a noticeable spike to API calls, and to the costs experienced by Haier.
If there were about 500 active installs, that could cost something between 500 and 1,500 USD per month, based on the polling rates, probably immaterial in the grand scheme of things, but noticeable.
The context I’m talking about, is that they built this API knowing it wasn’t going to be called that much… many of the interactions customers saw would be driven by push notifications or other event driven things. It’s only called by the app/website when people visit… it was never costed for being called continuously.
They didn’t optimise that cost, because it didn’t make sense to.
But still, why aren’t they doing it cheaper?
Bluntly because “total cost of operation” (TCO) is more than just the compute.
Sure I could just “spin up a VM and do it all myself” but then I’m doing it all myself. I’m suddenly in the realm of patching. I’ve got to do my own auth.
If AWS are terminating your HTTPS endpoint, then AWS are on the hook for the latest HTTP desynchronisation exploit.
When you host stuff on managed services (of any provider) you’re really going hands off, you don’t need an ops team because ultimately, there isn’t generally anything that you can operate… If there’s an outage, often times, you just have to wait for the provider to fix it.
That might feel disempowering, but also, there’s no point having an on-call team and waking someone at 3am to go “Yup, it’s fucked” but be unable to actually fix it.
In summary
There’s usually a cheaper way to deploy things.
The question is “is it actually cheaper, everything else considered?”
Don’t try to second guess other peoples architecture, and if you are going to poll an API, try to do it considerately…