My GP's practice went to a SaaS provider for electronic health records. Never mind transmission costs -- there is no standard way to export their patient records in order to move to a different provider. It requires a custom consulting services contract with their existing provider to retrieve their patient records, at an exorbitant price tag.
AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
61–70 of 252 posts
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Who cares if you can saturate it? Breakeven is 18 terabytes/month, or 0.6% utilization on that line.
You could do this even just pegging the line 9 minutes per day and otherwise leaving it unused. ;)
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#63Is 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.
A major issue is that in most markets outside of Europe, peering is less common, and transit prices are significantly higher.
Europe is probably the most competitive and best market in this case, almost all other markets are dominated by monopolies. Yes, even significantly worse than the Telekom monopoly.
Look at transit in Singapore, Japan or Australia. Or even in Brasil. You’ll go bankrupt even from trying to deliver a single movie to customers.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#64"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.
Yup. It is like a gravity well. Escape velocity is your egress data charges ;)
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#65where's Corey Quinn
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#66Earlier 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…
> Why hasn't a spot-market for transfer been introduced?
Enron tried to create a market for this.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2001/11/enron-a-bandwidth-bloodbath/
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#67"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.
If I'm not mistaken AWS has the highest egress rates of the major cloud providers.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#68Fairly 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.
any in the US?
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#69Earlier 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'…
>But I generally don't find this too hard to follow?
This is just the static picture though. What's harder to predict are the consequences of some innocuous looking code change.
Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
#70Is 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 g…
> 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.
The example given above for comparison, Hetzner, also doesn't charge for inbound and internal transfer AFAIK. Nor "the additional systems a customer uses". You pay a charge for the server, you get some amount of traffic included, and if you go over, the additional traffic costs something like $1.1/TB. That's all you pay.