AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

Post by jann » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #194

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...

> so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system This is one of those gotcha's that company's hit. They see the public pricing page and think "wow that is much cheaper than one my internal IT department charges for X", and then when they go to actually implement they find that "best practice" says they basically have to more than double or even triple the cost to get a reliable system (more because not…

Post by austinheap » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

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…

Post by mostlystatic » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

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

Post by satanspastaroll » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #38

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.

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…

Post by satanspastaroll » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 7:23 AM UTC

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…