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AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

theinformation.com

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Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

This seems a little deliberately obtuse -- for example, showing two arrows from an EC2 instance to an EC2 instance that exits the VPC. But I generally don't find this too hard to follow? Traffic within an AZ is generally free, but there are some cases where it's not and they generally make sense to me (leaving the VPC, pushing data from your CDN back upstream, etc.)

Then again, I worked for AWS for years, so maybe I'm just used to thinking this way so I'm not really surprised by it.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#33
post #23

Maybe 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.

>"The chart, which is based on internal AWS sales figures obtained by The Information,"

I'm not sure that "stolen" is the right word but, yes, it certainly appears based on what The Information wrote that either someone at AWS or a third-party with access to the info (probably not too likely) leaked the confidential numbers. Disgruntled former employee or... Who knows.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#34
post #31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

This seems a little deliberately obtuse -- for example, showing two arrows from an EC2 instance to an EC2 instance that exits the VPC. But I generally don't find this too hard to follow? Traffic within an AZ is generally free, but there are some cases where it's not and they generally make sense to me (leaving the VPC, pushing data from your CDN back upstream, etc.) Then again, I worked for AWS for years, so maybe I'…

There was a time when you paid for available bandwidth. Then network operators realized they could oversell their capacity and not spend the money to upgrade their network.

You still see paying for bandwidth with residential connections, though some operators (like Comcast) are trying to do away with it.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#35
post #6

Is 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.

Also Hetzner offers hosting that works sometimes/ maybe. I only consider it a viable option in the earliest days of starting a project.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#36
post #6

Is 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.

It has no basis in reality. You can buy a 10Gbps transit circuit for $1500/month. That's $0.00046296296 per gigabyte.

That depends on how much saturation you can get. Most end users/companies can’t saturate this reliably, or have much spoiler traffic. Only the biggest players can minimise their seasonality enough to get close to this, and doing that is a service that it’s probably worth paying for.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#37

Fairly 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.

a $20/mo old server from hetzner gives you unlimited 1Gbps - thats 324TB /mo

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#38
post #6

Is 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.

Disclaimer: I worked on an AWS service team.

This is, oddly enough, similar to a debate people have about consumers TV or Internet: should pricing be "unlimited" or "a la carte"?

AWS is combining all your networking charges into one lump "outgoing data transfer" fee. So it's heavily marked up in comparison to what they're paying for the outgoing data transfer, and you're not sure how much is profit vs. whether it's going to cover all their other costs.

So it might be fairer if AWS broke out separate line items for internal, incoming and outgoing data transfer, plus all the additional systems a customer uses.

I think AWS's billing is probably already on the falling side of diminishing marginal returns. That is, it's complex enough that more information would tend to hinder customers from getting the best price. Right now, if I plan to reduce my data charges, I have one variable to tinker with. If we expand this, it would mean I'm having to balance incoming / internal and outgoing charges. That sounds simple, but in terms of engineering it can be very complex.

The next claim is that this biases customers not to move. Of course, Azure and GCP have the same arrangement, so while you pay to move out of AWS, you don't pay to move in to Azure or GCP. So all the vendors are attempting to lock you in to their product, and at the same time trying to extricate you from their competitors, overall it's a wash.

So, yes, part of the motivation for egress charges is that ingress is a loss leader. But it's also true that egress is a metric that does, for the vast majority of their customers, directly translate into customer value. If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#39

Cheap shovels and expensive ladders.

Amazon has gone one step past that and made the shovels expensive too. The fear of buying a computer has made them billions.

>The fear of buying a computer has made them billions.

Are you saying that AWS service aren't providing value to their customers but it's fear-based marketing?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#40
post #37

Fairly 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.

a $20/mo old server from hetzner gives you unlimited 1Gbps - thats 324TB /mo

Good deal - I do most of my work in the US, I don't know of a similar deal here.
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