"The charges don’t appear to be a case of cloud providers gouging their customers" I disagree on this one. The margins on egress are, well...egregious.
The point is to make it easy to move data in and hard to move it out.
Just like a roach motel!
AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
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Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point everyone realized they could charge a massive premium per bit and as long as everyone did it, customers would have to pay. So here we are.
Customers are also to blame, when comparing the costs of two services they tend to look at the cost of an instance hour, or lambda execution and often don't look at transfer costs. Even if a cloud provider had competitive transfer costs they likely wouldn't attract any new customers and would have less margin left over to subsidize the main cost customers look at, $ per instance hour. The less attention is paid to tr…
I wouldn't blame customers when the pricing for data transfer looks like this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-guides/og-aws/master/...
(Source Open Guide to AWS - https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws)
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#23Maybe I missed it but where did they get this info? Was it stolen from AWS?
As far as I know, Apple would never share cost data like this, nor would a lot of others on this list. Apple doesn’t even publicly acknowledge that they are customers.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#24Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.
Because this is what the market agrees to bear.
They want you to keep all of your data in their cloud, do all your processing there using their services (because doing it elsewhere incurs expensive egress fees), and get paid handsomely for your need to actually serve the data to your customers.
This also makes a migration additionally expensive, because you would need to egress all your data (old logs, some fresh backups, etc) in a short while.
So it's basically a soft lock-in.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#25The only thing worse than the data transfer costs is explaining them to your non-cloud-savvy stakeholders. Go ahead, try explain this sh*t to your board.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#26For a service I built on AWS lambda, the far majority of the cost was just data egress. Unfortunately I haven’t found a competitor that offers the same kind of features that I’m using lambda for (running golang with additional custom binaries)
Azure is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance[1]. If you use Azure's serverless functions and put your service behind Cloudflare, you'll get free egress.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#27Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.
Yes. It's a scam.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#28Fairly large optimization if you're smaller and a large amount of your data out is cachable is to run a varnish cache on some of the clouds that give you "free" bandwidth.
ie a $20/mo instance on linode gets you 4TB of transfer -- $0.005 per gig. Scale enough of these in various DCs around the world and you have a pretty cheap self-hosted CDN.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point everyone realized they could charge a massive premium per bit and as long as everyone did it, customers would have to pay. So here we are.
Customers are also to blame, when comparing the costs of two services they tend to look at the cost of an instance hour, or lambda execution and often don't look at transfer costs. Even if a cloud provider had competitive transfer costs they likely wouldn't attract any new customers and would have less margin left over to subsidize the main cost customers look at, $ per instance hour. The less attention is paid to tr…
I think this has more to do with collusion than consumer behavior. On average consumers are very rational, even if their rationality is hard to explain.
The issue with per-bit pricing is that a fair agreement for network use would probably look like paying a fee that makes up for the amortization of the network equipment. Anything else is an artificially restricted market created in an attempt to extract more value out of consumers by having them bid against each other.
At some point, yes, we will run out of places to put the switches and routers and then the cost of connectivity will be closer to the cost of land use and will mimic rent, but we are a ways away from that.