If Forge would have been adopted within Atlassian for any serious core feature development (to a similar degree as P2 in DC) with the proper feedback loop from the internal developers, Forge would be already looking more like “Connect on EKS and RDS inside Atlassian controlled infrastructure”, rather than the overengineered Lambda-based solution with uncontrollable and uncapped consumption-based pricing.
Instead, we are still waiting for container-based runtime, which maybe will ship just a few months before the final Connect deprecation.
The simplest and fairest solution is to not charge vendors for log output that they did not ask for. I would suggest making Atlassian/Forge derived logs free or able to be stopped.
We currently use a third-party logging service for streaming logs. We have a defined monthly plan and we pay a fixed amount. If the capacity is exceeded, we get an alert and they start dropping logs. This provides complete cost control and it allows us to respond to spikes as we deem appropriate.
For services like logging, having a cutoff slider would be fantastic. In addition to excluding Atlassian-generated logging, let vendors set their maximum log ingestion per month (bonus points if you display the expected cost next to it), and don’t log (or bill) for logging attempts above that limit.
If a vendor configures a maximum of 10 Gb of log ingestion per month, I would expect the actual accepted logged data to be 10 Gb plus however much additional logging Atlassian itself forces to be logged. (If I am paying for 10 Gb of data, I want to be able to see 10 Gb of my data, plus whatever data of yours that may also be included.)
It’s the end of the week here in NZ so I just wanted to share a few updates on our thinking:
We’re looking into the Forge Remote/System logs as a priority. Either we’ll change these over to be metrics (which are free), or exclude system generated logs from your app’s usage.
With respect to suppressing logging for certain customers, log levels etc. we don’t have any specific plans here but we do have feature flags coming soon (expressions of interest) which you will be able to use to adjust logging levels from developer console if you wish.
The broader topic of setting alerts/limits/controls on spiky costs is something we’ll keep exploring. We’ll have alerts for apps approaching the free threshold but keen to get more feedback on what should happen after the threshold has been reached.