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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

#181

Post by ValentineC »

crazysim wrote: post #160
js4ever wrote: post #105

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.

To save everyone else a lookup:

> 66.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public Internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing Services as described in the Documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your data services or suspend your account.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#182

Post by bmurphy1976 »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #56
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…

> If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works. Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge: > There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrang…

All that tells us is that cloudflare has a different revenue stream. Amazon is a business and they are in the business of making money. If they weren't charging for egress bandwidth they'd just charge for something else.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#183

Post by freehunter »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #165
chatmasta wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's in their docs

Their docs say it’s configured by default on EU servers?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#184

Post by pm90 »

ben509 wrote: post #173
pm90 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The doctrine for HA is that each AZ should be fully independent, and if you do that, your inter-AZ traffic is relatively minimal. And I think the charges for inter-AZ transfer are to incentivize customers to do that. Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system...

> Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system...

Yeah, and keeping around warm systems ready to failover in case of a zonal outage seems like a preposterous waste of resources.

The alternative... to keep around multiple replicas of your system in different zones, all ready to accept traffic and which do serve traffic, seems more practical and less wasteful.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#185

Post by chickenpotpie »

Havoc wrote: post #151
chickenpotpie wrote: post #60

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

It's actually cheaper when you want global redundant storage. Cloud providers often charge twice as much for global redundant data. RAID 2,3,4 offer global redundancy, but only take up 1.5 times us much space. Instead of paying twice as much you only end up paying 1.5 times as much because you can get away with locally redundant pricing. If you're large enough you'll actually save money by having more negotiating power since you can walk away from a provider at any given time.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#186

Post by erik_seaberg »

pm90 wrote: post #184
ben509 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doctrine for HA is that each AZ should be fully independent, and if you do that, your inter-AZ traffic is relatively minimal. And I think the charges for inter-AZ transfer are to incentivize customers to do that. Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system...

> Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system... Yeah, and keeping around warm systems ready to failover in case of a zonal outage seems like a preposterous waste of resources. The alternative... to keep around multiple replicas of your system in different zones, all ready to accept traffic and which do serve traffic, seems…

This. Paying for n+2 capacity is really expensive when n=1, but pretty reasonable at n=5 or n=10. Until someone gouges you on data transfer …

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#187

Post by bufferoverflow »

buboard wrote: post #37
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.

a $20/mo old server from hetzner gives you unlimited 1Gbps - thats 324TB /mo

For $1.67/mo, you can get unlimited 1Gbps here:

https://servercheap.net/crm/cart.php?gid=10

Or if you don't trust "unlimited", Hetzner sells CX11 with 20TB/mo for 2.96 eur/mo

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#188

Post by bufferoverflow »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #68
mlyle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$32/mo (Seattle)

https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/2372

$40/mo (Seattle)

https://www.dedimax.com/bare-metal-server/16954

$40/mo (Seattle)

https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/1894

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#189

Post by late2part »

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).

Inter-AZ traffic is Metro Area Network ("MAN") traffic. There is a cost for running network between locations.

This explains the cost.

Price probably should be based on value, not on cost. Why do they charge for it? Because they decided it's a good way to make money and profit.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#190

Post by united893 »

Just curious, how on earth did Kevin and Amir get such incredibly detailed of AWS spending of these accounts.

Either they put it together from public resources, or (more worrysome) someone at AWS leaked them line-item based expenses of their top customers.

This has got to be incredibly sensitive data for AWS, not something they'd want leaked. If I'm (say) AirBnB or Snap, I'd worry that this data leaks information that would be detrimental to their ability to negotiate for cloud computing with Google, Microsoft etc.

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