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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

#91
post #4

"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.

All of them (AWS, GCP, Azure) are priced outrageously compared to high quality, well peered, bandwidth.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#92

I've actually been working on a library to help mitigate cloud storage lock-in. The idea is to treat cloud storage providers like disks are treated in RAID. For example, you have 3 separate cloud providers. Cloud providers 1 and 2 have every other byte of data striped across them. Cloud provider 3 has parity data. To pull a file you can only need 2 of the 3 cloud providers. If you don't like how a cloud storage provi…

Sounds exactly what is Tahoe-LAFS for.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should set up a big fat pipe right outside of Amazon data centers with free unlimited transfers, get data on behalf of customers copied to hard drives from AWS, and then attach those hard drives to the Uber pipe. I bet that service could work for a short & glorious moment in time.

That would still require egress.

How about just sending Freedom Of Information Act request to the NSA asking them for a copy of your data. I think this is a joke...

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should set up a big fat pipe right outside of Amazon data centers with free unlimited transfers, get data on behalf of customers copied to hard drives from AWS, and then attach those hard drives to the Uber pipe. I bet that service could work for a short & glorious moment in time.

Amazon beat you to it: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Snowball still charges ~3 cents/GB to get it out of S3 and into Snowball.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#95
post #92

I've actually been working on a library to help mitigate cloud storage lock-in. The idea is to treat cloud storage providers like disks are treated in RAID. For example, you have 3 separate cloud providers. Cloud providers 1 and 2 have every other byte of data striped across them. Cloud provider 3 has parity data. To pull a file you can only need 2 of the 3 cloud providers. If you don't like how a cloud storage provi…

Sounds exactly what is Tahoe-LAFS for.

Yeah it's pretty similar. However, I'm focusing entirely on the cloud, keeping the package lightweight, and giving the consuming application decisions on how to store the data based off their needs.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#96
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would still require egress.

I was going to say it’d be an improvement but I can’t actually make sense of the AWS Snowball proving https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

The pricing seems relatively clear:

A flat fee for the act of a human getting the data onto the physical medium ($200) + the cost of shipping (So if your getting out 30 TB of data that's $200 + ~$100 + ($0.03 * 30000) = ~$1200

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken AWS has the highest egress rates of the major cloud providers.

All of them (AWS, GCP, Azure) are priced outrageously compared to high quality, well peered, bandwidth.

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#99
post #87
post #81

I've worked at at least one company where we found using Direct Connect to a data center somewhere and egressing via that data center instead of amazon saved us significant bandwidth costs.

amazon still charges for traffic through direct connect(50%), dont they?

2cents per GB vs 9cents per GB.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#100
post #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 g…

> AWS is combining all your networking charges into one lump "outgoing data transfer" fee

> So it might be fairer if AWS broke out separate line items for internal, incoming and outgoing data transfer

This explanation doesn't cut it for me - most (all?) "traditional" VPS providers don't charge for ingress traffic, and I doubt anyone, ever, has charged for internal traffic.

So what exactly is 'all the networking charges' comprised of, other than egress data?

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