Garbage QCloud CDN: From Getting Started to Giving Up?

Table of Contents

While Swedish Ma and I disagree sharply on cloud databases VS DBA issues, we can reach consensus on one point: domestic public cloud vendors really make garbage. In Ma’s words: “Alibaba Cloud is a legitimate cloud with poor engineering quality, but Tencent Cloud is a bunch of amateur salespeople plus business coders playing games.”

Background
#

I have software hosted on GitHub, providing 1MB source code packages and 1GB offline software package downloads. Since mainland users can’t download from GitHub domestically, I needed a domestic download address, so I used Tencent Cloud’s COS (Object Storage) and CDN (Content Delivery Network) services.

My CDN intentions were simple: 1. Acceleration, 2. Cost savings. Internet traffic fees are usually 0.8 yuan per GB, using CDN traffic packages can save substantial traffic costs by half. Since CDN is exclusively for domestic users, I only bought domestic traffic packages. It worked reasonably well until late February, when I suddenly discovered some anomalous charges.

Clicking in, I saw CDN charged several hundred yuan. I thought maybe some channel made downloads popular? So I entered the data statistics analysis interface and saw that during this period, total software package downloads were less than 100GB, at most tens of yuan — how could I be charged hundreds?

Clicking for analysis — good grief, 1TB access traffic, all from “overseas other” — what the hell?

So I called Tencent Cloud customer service:

Deflection x1: Our TOP isn’t accurate, you need to check logs.

So I downloaded a log copy to see who was bored enough to brute-force attack. Result: a bunch of requests without even client IP addresses.

Deflection x2: Customer service said this is probably an “attack”! So scary!

This rhetoric trying to fool me? Uninformed users hearing “attack” might get scared into buying public cloud vendors’ “high-defense services.”

After going in circles for another half hour, they finally told me the real reason: traffic fees were deducted for “warming up”. So these requests without “source IPs” finally revealed the truth: turns out it’s “guarding and stealing, thief crying thief” — your own system came to brute-force my traffic!

Engineer phone communication explained: Our CDN warming works like this — all CDN nodes come to origin for requests, so we got these 20,000 requests and 1TB traffic.

Hearing this explanation, I nearly burst out laughing. Why do I buy CDN? To save object storage traffic costs. CDN refreshing and warming is cloud vendor internal system traffic — why should users pay for it? But your one refresh warming cost more than a year’s worth of direct object storage downloads.

Fine, let’s say warming requires payment — an engineering-logical approach would be each major region requesting object storage origin once, then distributing and syncing to each terminal node. Paying several times traffic fees, I wouldn’t mind. 1GB software costing 10GB warming, customers wouldn’t complain.

Tencent Cloud CDN is different — warming a 1MB/1GB software package, each terminal node directly requests, generating 1TB “warming traffic.” At 0.8 yuan per 1GB traffic fee, hundreds of yuan vanished. More absurd: my CDN serves mainland users, overseas users don’t need it — direct GitHub downloads work fine — yet all this traffic went “overseas,” and pre-purchased domestic traffic packages couldn’t offset it at all. Tencent Cloud’s documentation never mentioned the volume and origin of this “warming.” I believe this constitutes factual fraud and malicious pig-butchering schemes, far worse than 《Are Cloud Databases Intelligence Taxes?》.

So a simple 1MB/1GB software package going through CDN distribution, which might normally cost a few yuan daily, became hundreds of yuan with one button click. Hiding internal traffic well on monitoring charts; stuffing internal traffic that should be free onto users in billing logic.

CDN warming internal traffic — how dare they charge users?

A few hundred yuan cost doesn’t hurt me, but as a user, I feel my intelligence was insulted. Tencent Cloud suggested refunding half — how about full refund? I didn’t take a cent — I just want to write an article telling everyone how crappy and idiotic this product is.

Alibaba Cloud, whatever else, at least gets some respect from me in certain areas. But Tencent Cloud’s performance truly disgraces Chinese public cloud — such a large company coming out to do cloud without understanding such basic things. No wonder people say:

China has no cloud computing, only IDC 2.0

Coming out to sell like this — better wash up and sleep early.