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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

#161

Post by thispbowden »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #83
planteen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you doing this to replace a CDN? There are already 3rd party CDNs like CloudFlare. If you are doing it as a replacement for traffic within an AWS region and availability zone, it seems like you will be both more expensive and have much higher latency. Or is the application something else entirely?

It's something else entirely. It's a mixed cloud approach combining the storage offerings of Azure, Google Cloud, and S3 providers. The idea is not to trust one cloud provider to provide fair pricing and proper redundancy. Right now I'm mirroring RAID 0,1, and 3. Applying RAID 3 to the cloud is going to give you higher latency and more processor and memory usage because the file has to be reassembled on the client ma…

Sounds a little like gluster?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#162

Post by kuschku »

iptrans wrote: post #80
kuschku wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deliv…

Actually Singapore and Australia aren't that terrible anymore. Hurricane Electric has POPs in both Singapore and Australia. Transport between Singapore and Australia is $1.50 or less. Peering ports are $0.20 per Mbps. If all you want to do is push movies at customers, there are plenty of dedicated server providers who will sell you bandwidth on the cheap in both countries. Obviously YMMV if you want better routes or…

Well that's exactly the issue, HE often doesn't have peering with local monopolies, or at best only a 10G link, because those monopolies don't even care.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#163

Post by chatmasta »

merb wrote: post #152
mostlystatic wrote: post #141

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

That seems like the kind of thing that should be configured by default on servers in the EU.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#164

Post by ben509 »

GordonS wrote: post #100
ben509 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 charg…

AWS is vast. I have no idea what their overall accounting for networking looks like. Even for the tiny service I worked on, it would be tough to guess at what are overall costs were. We actually had an internal bill each month for all the regular AWS services we used, but then there were a host of internal services we depended on.

That companies don't charge for specific things doesn't mean those things don't cost them anything. It just means they're trying to work out a pricing scheme that scales with customer usage and is broadly understandable. So "data egress" is really just a proxy for "how much stuff you're doing with the networking subsystems of AWS."

Same thing with EC2, there are a whole pile of costs that are summed up with "time you rented an instance."

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#166

Post by geggam »

pm90 wrote: post #125
ben509 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get your point, but then why does AWS charge for inter-az traffic? That seems like an "egress but not really" kinda thing. If AWS/GCP stopped charging for this, customers would be incentivized to build HA systems and distribute their workloads across AZ's, which are a win for both customers and you (since capacity is now spread instead of stuck in a zone).

Something has to pay for the fat pipe between colos ( AZ's)

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#168

Post by semiotagonal »

berns wrote: post #85
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.

> Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? Isn't DigitalOcean a cloud provider ($0.01/GB)?. Isn't Oracle a cloud provider (first 10 TB free, $ 0.0085 after)? Isn't OVH a cloud provider (free bandwidth)?

Unless I'm making a mistake someplace, Digital Ocean includes 1TB egress to the internet from a $5-per-month host. On Google Cloud Platform that egress would cost $120/month by itself.

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#Compute

https://cloud.google.com/compute/network-pricing

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#169

Post by geggam »

EB66 wrote: post #126
mlyle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

+1 for this. People forget just how affordable it can be to maintain your own infrastructure. You can have the hardware and network capable of supporting 10X your average traffic loads and still have it operate far more cost effectively than the equivalent traffic on AWS. At my work, we slashed our overall hosting costs by moving a data warehouse off of AWS and on to our own self-maintained infrastructure. But with a…

I have had this debate with so many people, AWS is not cheaper than your own hosting. Period.

What you get from AWS is the logistics pipeline is already built as is the infrastructure should you suddenly require to serve factors of traffic more.

The ROI of AWS comes from the backend and capex vs opex debates.

Example : The CFO can go to the board and explain we are getting ready to reduce opex by laying off 10 developers at 150k yr during any meeting. The capex cost is usually fixed and hard to explain away.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#170

Post by GordonS »

ben509 wrote: post #164
GordonS wrote: post #100

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…

AWS is vast. I have no idea what their overall accounting for networking looks like. Even for the tiny service I worked on, it would be tough to guess at what are overall costs were. We actually had an internal bill each month for all the regular AWS services we used, but then there were a host of internal services we depended on. That companies don't charge for specific things doesn't mean those things don't cost th…

See a lower comment I made here; what I really want is a little transparency about pricing.

Of course there are is an internal cost of doing business, and peripheral infrastructure cost - but if I pay $100 for service "A" I reasonably expect that fee pays for service "A". Instead, egress bandwidth costs seem to be used to trick customers into thinking services are cheaper than they really are.

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