Be careful with Nodechef's APM/Kadira service

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Howdy y’all. Just wanted to share my experience here so that others can make informed decisions.

TLDR; Nodechef advertises $10/mo, but the costs pile up very quickly.

UPDATE: Nodechef have adjusted their system so that deploying a new build to Galaxy doesn’t automatically add an extra node and charge additional funds. Have yet to fully test, but I’ll update this thread if I have further issues!

I’ve been running a Galaxy instance with 2 containers for a while now. I’ve considered their built-in APM service, but it’s a little bit pricey. So, I went ahead and built my own Kadira instance on Digital Ocean for $20/month. As some of you know, Kadira hogs a lot of database storage as time goes on, which requires occasional pruning to keep the app responsive.

Yesterday I decided to give Nodechef’s APM offering a go. After all, it was advertised as $10/month and I expected they’d be able to manage things a lot better than me. Their offering says “1 host, unlimited apps.” I wasn’t entirely sure on what that meant, but I took it to mean that I could setup multiple apps in Kadira for the $10/month. I set one up for my local testing environment and one for my production environment. Lo-and-behold, I was charged an extra $10 for the second app because it was coming from a different IP.

Further, I was charged per container for my Galaxy instance. So now I’m up to $30 instead of $10/month that I was anticipating. Then last night, I decided to tweak my container sizes a little bit on Galaxy, and bam – another 2x $10 charge came through instantly. So now I’m up to $50 for 24 hours of Kadira – a service I was paying $20/month for under my own Digital Ocean instance.

Bottom line: careful jumping into this if you have any sort of load balancing or local environment that you want to run Kadira in. Nodechef makes it seem like a cheap and easy alternative, but costs pile up way quicker than you anticipate and there’s absolutely no way to go back on it.

At this point I’m planning to move back to a self-hosted solution.

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Thank you so much for notifying us. I immediately checked our billing and indeed… its charging us per App!

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Thanks for sharing your experience. One question related to that: When I tried to host Kadira myself the last time, the tutorials I found on the internet were somehow incomplete and I didn’t really get it working (tried it on AWS about 3 months ago). What documentation did you use to successfully set-up your own instance?

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I basically dove into the system trying to fix as much of the errors possible, troubleshooting the stuff that didn’t gave me any error, but wasn’t working either.

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I’ve had success with this one: https://github.com/edemaine/kadira-compose

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Thanks, that looks very promising!

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We do acknowledge this incovenience to the user and have made the neccessary changes in our billing system to accomodate his use case. (Deployments in dynamic environments).
We have since credited the users account.

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Glad my compose script is getting use! I learned a lot from this forum, and wanted to make it easy for others.

I still need to incorporate a “clean old data” cron job to it… Let me know if you have any other issues!

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