I got a notification from AWS that our SQS rendezvous service exceeded the free-tier usage this month with over 1,000,000 SQS API requests. This is in some sense exciting news, because it shows that the rendezvous channel is effective and getting some use.
It does, however mean that we will have to start paying for the service. The current billing period falls on month boundaries, from January 1st to January 31st. The budget action fired on January 9th, which is pretty early in the month. Looking at our broker metrics[0,1], there were approximately 38,608 client polls using SQS. That's approximately 2.5 requests per poll, which is about what I'd expect.
It's reassuring to know that the budget actions work. I'm going to set them a little higher, to something I can reasonably afford. I don't yet know how the cost will scale with the number of polls, and how that will compare with the cost of domain fronted requests.
[0] https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/metrics [1] https://metrics.torproject.org/collector.html#type-snowflake-stats