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AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

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Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#41

Post by throwaway5752 »

gruez wrote: 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.

I was just reading about advisor termination fee terms which were some substantial multiple of all fees incurred over some past number of years.

People under pressure make short term optimizations at the expense of long term strategy. There's nothing more to it. AWS reduced compute and IT expenses in the next few fiscal years, so people jumped all in on it. Solve the problem now. Someone will fix it in the future.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#42

Post by penagwin »

manigandham wrote: post #14
skunkworker wrote: post #3

For 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)

Both Azure and GCP let you run arbitrary containers in a serverless fashion. GCP Cloud Run is per-request too.

Yes but both still charge crazy money for the bandwidth.

(Although Azure is apart of the bandwidth alliance if you use cloudflare/b2)

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#43

Post by penagwin »

whoisjuan wrote: post #11
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Anyone (no longer under NDA) know if Apple intends to migrate user iCloud data from AWS and GCP object stores to their own data centers at some point?

> no longer under NDA Do NDAs expire? AFAIK you sign an NDA and you’re bound to respect that forever. Unless the knowledge becomes publicly available.

Question for any lawyers here, do NDA's have any form of "natural expiration" if no explicit expiration date is set?

What happens to them if the company goes out of business?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#46

Post by mlyle »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #28

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.

Lots of places that have 1gbps bare metal unmetered boxes for ~$200/mo, too. At 10% utilization that's about $0.005/gig.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#47

Post by spullara »

eric_b wrote: post #45

It's nickel and diming all the way. I always thought the S3 pricing was sort of ridiculous. Pay for the amount you store (fair). Pay for the egress data (less fair but ok...). Pay for the number of API calls! (lol!)

It wasn't true at first but people abused the hell out of it, for example, by storing data only in the filename. The API cost prevents very inefficient use of S3.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#48

Post by skunkworker »

cosmie wrote: post #26
skunkworker wrote: post #3

For 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. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

I was aware of the bandwidth alliance, though looking on their KB for now it's only discounted egress [1]. Same with Google, though not part of the bandwidth alliance, data delivered through their CDN Interconnect program starts at $0.04/gb (NA) [2]

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001614391...

[2] https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/how-to/cdn-interc...

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#49

Post by nickjj »

nine_k wrote: post #24
gruez wrote: 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.

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 bac…

> Because this is what the market agrees to bear.

I think it's more than that because a lot of folks aren't aware of the costs until they need to or want to move and then they get hit with a massive bill.

So maybe they chalk it up to experience and pay the bill because they have no other choice or calculated it's still better in the long term.

To me that's a much difference scenario than walking into a store and happily buying a dozen eggs for anywhere between $1 and $1.50. In this case you know what you're getting into before you make the purchase and everyone around you (other customers and businesses) decided that's what eggs will sell for in the open market. With outgoing data fees, it's more like a "take it or leave it" price dictated by the provider while they already have your data and there's no price competition since they are the sole business with your data.

Whether or not it's the customer's fault for not doing enough research is debatable, but it certainly doesn't help that most providers make it pretty difficult to calculate costs.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#50

Post by asdfman123 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #41
gruez wrote: 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.

I was just reading about advisor termination fee terms which were some substantial multiple of all fees incurred over some past number of years. People under pressure make short term optimizations at the expense of long term strategy. There's nothing more to it. AWS reduced compute and IT expenses in the next few fiscal years, so people jumped all in on it. Solve the problem now. Someone will fix it in the future.

Programmers should campaign for hefty termination fees. Sure, you can fire me, but you'd have to pay me one year's salary.

Actually, it would probably just make some programmers even more intolerable.

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