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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

#241

Post by frandroid »

jrockway wrote: post #109
frandroid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the fear of buying a computer, it's also the fear of hiring staff...

I don't think Amazon really provides any products that are going to prevent you from hiring staff. That's the domain of companies like Zendesk or Salesforce. All they provide you is the bare metal in easily-purchasable quantities. Whatever time you saved not having to lug a server up to your datacenter and plug it in will be spent debugging CloudFormation stacks or figuring out how to auction off your reserved instan…

Obviously you'll still need some staff. But suddenly you don't need staff that knows how to handle physical server rooms and data centers, you limit it to AWS which covers a whole range of needs which would need to be addressed by different staff with different skillsets.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#242

Post by DoctorOetker »

chillfox wrote: post #209
DoctorOetker wrote: post #197

does anyone know of a cheap service to order large amounts of data by mail on physical media? I am often interested in some dataset for which I can afford the storage in the form of a hard drive but not in the form of a download through my home connection. If a service existed that simply offered the following: * customer provides URL (and optionally hash checksum) * customer pays, and later receives hard disk drive…

I don't think it would be a cheap service if you set a modest goal of earning a cinema trip with popcorn and a drink for every trip to the post office. 1TB HDD: 59 AUD International Shipping (assuming we can keep it under 1kg with packaging): 38 AUD That is 97 AUD before considering any profit you might want to make (35 AUD for the movie + small popcorn and drink), fixed setup costs like a NAS to cache data sets or t…

If someone hails a cab on uber, one doesn't hail a cab from a different continent...

there seems to be plenty of opportunities here, like buy or rent an old bank building with the individually lockable drawers, put your drive in the locker which has a USB cable or ethernet cable, close the locker, use some app to set the URL / hash, pay, and you get a ETA, download complete notification, and a deadline to pick it up (or else incur a fee to unlock the drawer proportional to overtime).

I guess the idea could be pitched to those operating rentable local PO boxes, using similar lockers, but with internet connectivity.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#243

Post by lacker »

notyourday wrote: post #77
lacker wrote: post #73

Even the huge-looking bill for Apple is only 6.5% of their total bill. Moving data into AWS is free, so it's not totally surprising that they pay for that by making other stuff more expensive. I found it more interesting just to see a list of their top ten customers. In particular I didn't realize that Capital One had so much infrastructure.

> Even the huge-looking bill for Apple is only 6.5% of their total bill. Moving data into AWS is free, so it's not totally surprising that they pay for that by making other stuff more expensive Moving data into any network that is outbound heavy is free because both paid peering and transit is settled based on a peak percentile traffic (unless it is flat rate). That's why the "gansta" position is to have a balanced i…

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted, it makes a good point! I had not thought about the likely-to-be-outbound-heavy nature of cloud providers and how that affects things.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#244

Post by K0SM0S »

snark42 wrote: post #180
K0SM0S wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear more and more cases of businesses moving parts off of the cloud, back on-premises. I think, in a wider perspective, it's going to play back and forth. The 2010's were 'forth' towards the cloud, the 2020's might see a peak back on-prems, etc. It's generally a function of network cost versus infra cost, and so the 'equation' solves differently based on the longest tech cycles, from inception to maturity to skill…

> It's generally a function of network cost versus infra cost, and so the 'equation' solves differently based on the longest tech cycles, It used to be OpEx was easy, CapEx was hard to get approved. As people took advantage and OpEx went through the roof people are getting alot more pushback on reducing OpEx.

Spoken like a true Chief Officer.

Pushing back on OpEx in favor of CapEx might be seen as a more long-term strategy too. Basically rent vs purchase, even for deprecating assets like infosys, as I think the current DevOps trend (scaling in pure software, virtualization, etc) makes it easier than ever to squeeze every last FLOP on-premises.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#245

Post by Pfhreak »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #223
Pfhreak wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but surely teams have monitoring on their usage, right? With automated rollbacks or at least one click manual rollbacks?

Sure, but rolling back work that was already done is a waste of development resources.

Disagree. It's much more wasteful to have an outage. Roll back asap, fix the issue, roll forward, do post mortem, grow as an organization. Never repeat the same mistake.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#246

Post by Dylan16807 »

gcommer wrote: post #158
codexon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

So it's hard to value the premium for google cold potato specifically, if it outclasses everything else.

But their hot potato still costs $65+ per TB at medium volumes and $45+ per TB at high volumes. That is still extremely high compared to normal peering costs.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#247

Post by Dylan16807 »

privateSFacct wrote: post #228
semiotagonal wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What you find is if you spin up 1000 of these $5 hosts (ie, $5000 per month which is pretty) and try to egress 1PB per month you can't. Either they disconnect you, the systems can't actually handle it or some other gimmick. One thing folks like about AWS - you can actually know what you will be paying and there is no fake / hidden limits. That's my somewhat outdated experience wasting a TON of time on this idea ages…

But going back to the original number of $0.01/GB, that's what they state upfront as a bandwidth overage cost. I would be very surprised if they disliked customers paying the overage fee. And that's still only $10k per petabyte, vastly cheaper than AWS.

Give them a warning if you're going to spike your bill that high, but there shouldn't be any fake/hidden limits.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#248

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Pfhreak wrote: post #245
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but rolling back work that was already done is a waste of development resources.

Disagree. It's much more wasteful to have an outage. Roll back asap, fix the issue, roll forward, do post mortem, grow as an organization. Never repeat the same mistake.

We're obviously talking past each other.

What I'm saying is that for a hosting architecture to make it difficult to predict the cost of any code change is a downside compared to an architecture that makes such predictions easy and intuitive.

Of course you will try to mitigate any downsides and learn what you can from any mistakes. But unpredictability makes learning far more difficult than it should, which inevitably means a waste of development resources.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#249

Post by rbdeveloper »

croh wrote: post #216
cptaj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally is. I've been a developer for 10 years and AWS seems to me like its intentionally designed to be as messy as possible.

Totally agree. AWS should learn something from DO, instead of racking up services. Inconsistent UI completely sucks. It makes very difficult to track resources and billing. Resources from different regions need to be managed separately. Billing is too much complicated. I always feel AWS is hype. Very few applications need scaling like Netflix. But as it is now industry standard, people are adopting it blindly without…

Fun fact is, that Netflix only hosts their website on AWS, the video stream is delivered from their very own CDN which is completely self-engineered by them and multiple magnitudes cheaper than AWS: https://openconnect.netflix.com/

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#250

Post by rbdeveloper »

Elect2 wrote: post #171
js4ever wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly in S3 but S3/EC2 to lightsail is free within the same region :)

I tried but seems aws has closed the door. To connect ec2 to Lightsail via private IP I have to create a "ec2-classic VPC" in ec2. But aws has disabled "ec2-classic VPC" in all regions

From what I know is that you can peer the Lightsail (AWS-managed) VPC with your normal, default EC2 VPC via the Lightsail console. Then you launch EC2 instances in the default VPC for the transfer
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