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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

#151

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…

Pretty sure paying 3 cloud providers is more expensive than 1 cloud provider

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#152

I recently started running more Google Cloud VMs in the UK instead of the US. It was costing me £2 a day to run the VMs, but somehow I also paid £12 a day for "GCP Storage egress between NA and EU”. Turns out that by default Google's Docker container registry only stores the Docker images in the US. So each time I launched a VM the Docker image was downloaded from the US. I wrote more about it here: https://www.mattz…

actually there is a eu mirror for the gcp registry eu.gcr.io

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#153
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company was getting massive bills on AWS S3 egress. It was one of the reasons we moved to Wasabi for bucket storage; we then had to deal with a huge one time hit for egress, but in the long run the short term cost was worth it.

Do you think Wasabi is sustainable? I looked at them but find it hard to believe they can sustain free unlimited egress forever.

I like the Cloudflare/Backblaze duo. Presumably data stays on Cloudflare's network for as long as possible and goes to Backblaze via direct links, so Backblaze can provide free egress to Cloudflare customers (and customers of other serivces like Packet, etc.), while charging others.

This seems more sustainable than Wasabi's model, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#154
post #97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cold potato is not necessarily better, actually its often times worse than hot potato and usually used to lower costs so you don't have to pay other people for transit.

For example, a cold potato network may have a link from Dallas to Chicago to New York, while a hot potato network could have a direct link from Dallas to New York.

Cogent uses cold potato and is frequently worse than other transit providers.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#155
post #44
post #32

Wow, does it really cost 4-5x more to download a 1 GB file from S3 or Google Cloud Storage than it does to store it for a month? That is mind-blowing.

Bandwidth is expensive, storage is cheap.

cloud providers charge a lot more for bandwidth yes, but in reality bandwidth is much, much cheaper than storage for them to provide.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#156
post #53
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 happ…

That's still the market. The market isn't exclusively good, and has many failure modes. This is one of them.

While true, this dilutes the value of the statement. At that rate every price point “is the market”, and nothing of further interest can ever be said about counter intuitive pricing.

Sure, it’s the market. Why? Is it a Giffen good? Is it a case of very poor visibility of services to consumers? ...? There is something interesting going on, let’s figure it out.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 charg…

How many of these VPS providers are actually managing global highly availabile network infrastructure?

I guess there aren't that many global network providers - I'm not even sure how much fiber Amazon owns in Japan, Australia or Northern Europe for that matter.

But I think level3 is associated with:

https://www.centurylink.com/business/hybrid-it-cloud/public-...

And while they have a call-us price list (if you have to ask...) - they at least state:

"Public and Private high-capacity networking options up to 10Gbps. Note: there is no charge for internal data center traffic. Cost on a per-GB-out model"

I have no idea what they charge pr gb for this cloud product however.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#158
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cold potato is not necessarily better, actually its often times worse than hot potato and usually used to lower costs so you don't have to pay other people for transit. For example, a cold potato network may have a link from Dallas to Chicago to New York, while a hot potato network could have a direct link from Dallas to New York. Cogent uses cold potato and is frequently worse than other transit providers.

Google's cold potato is very good though.

(Also, they offer the option to use hot potato and pay them less: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/docs/overview )

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Why do you think that bandwidth costs should only cover the hardware? What about the electricity, rent, payroll, sales, marketing, administrative staff, insurance, accountants, lawyers, etc.

Well, by hardware I meant its maintenance as well. Doing so still leads you initially to the sale of bandwidth, not a bidding system.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#160

I have recently talked with a friend about a very cheap way to egress from AWS, at $2.5 per TB with the AWS lightsail $5 instance which include 2TB of egress per instance. This friend have extracted 200TB of backups for $500 instead of $17,000!

That's against Lightsail TOS, if you care.
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