The main issue we have with S3 is the extortionary egress bandwidth fee. Storage pricing seems OK, but what's the point if I can't send those files to users?
S3 isn't getting cheaper
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Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#12It looks like the most recent data point, S3 was actually cheaper than the raw storage, while providing 11 9's of durability, across multiple AZs. Still looks like a pretty good deal, as the price of storage has mostly flatlined in this graph. Nor does this even account for cold storage, or reduced redundancy.
The prices are in different units. S3 is $/GB-Mo, raw storage is in $/GB. So, when they are equal on the graph, you are paying each month to AWS what the cost of the raw disk is. Now, yes, you need a lot more than just raw disk to effectively store data, but even if you just assume a 5-year lifespan for that disk, the price difference displayed on the graph as equality is actually a 60x difference in plain $.
The price has also appeared to flat-line because they are using a linear graph scale for logarithmic data. It should use a log-scale for the y-axis.
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#13> It's hard to come to a firm conclusion since pricing data is held very secretly (AWS quickly deletes announcements of historical price decreases). That's not correct. Here is the history of every (properly tagged) price reduction AWS ever announced: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction/
Those blog posts are a good start. I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class. AFAIK there are some third parties that track the granular data, but it's not preserved anywhere on the AWS page. A lot of price decreases also might have happened silently (without a blog post) or as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price").
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#14The main issue we have with S3 is the extortionary egress bandwidth fee. Storage pricing seems OK, but what's the point if I can't send those files to users?
A bit tangential, but in some cases you can use S3 Gateway endpoints, which can dramatically reduce your egress costs if you're just accessing it within a VPC.
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpo...
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#15all amazon services seem so expensive, hundreds of dollars/ month bills easily for running a few large ec2 servers all month.
Why haven't there been a upstart taking market share? Why do only the big players get into the game and hold similar costs?
Large fixed costs, economies of scale, whole product (need compute AND storage). It's possible that a company like Cloudflare can disrupt certain verticals in storage that are mispriced by AWS yet have a larger than expected TAM.
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#16all amazon services seem so expensive, hundreds of dollars/ month bills easily for running a few large ec2 servers all month.
Why haven't there been a upstart taking market share? Why do only the big players get into the game and hold similar costs?
DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr...
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#17It looks like the most recent data point, S3 was actually cheaper than the raw storage, while providing 11 9's of durability, across multiple AZs. Still looks like a pretty good deal, as the price of storage has mostly flatlined in this graph. Nor does this even account for cold storage, or reduced redundancy.
That is the cost per month. Every single month you pay the full cost of the hardware you use.
The real killer on S3 is bandwidth anyway. Getting your data out of S3 costs much more than leaving it there, which I'm sure is by design.
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#18Cloudflare's entry into this market will be interesting no bandwidth costs might put real pressure on AWS to get reasonable with it's pricing.
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#19It looks like the most recent data point, S3 was actually cheaper than the raw storage, while providing 11 9's of durability, across multiple AZs. Still looks like a pretty good deal, as the price of storage has mostly flatlined in this graph. Nor does this even account for cold storage, or reduced redundancy.
The prices are in different units. S3 is $/GB-Mo, raw storage is in $/GB. So, when they are equal on the graph, you are paying each month to AWS what the cost of the raw disk is. Now, yes, you need a lot more than just raw disk to effectively store data, but even if you just assume a 5-year lifespan for that disk, the price difference displayed on the graph as equality is actually a 60x difference in plain $. The pri…
Now factor in redundancy and server costs, and the difference is not so huge. You're still paying a multiple of the raw cost, but unless you're storing on the exabyte scale I think it shouldn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Cost of a single engineer to manage a Minio cluster probably already outweighs the extra cost you're paying at any reasonable scale (i.e. most companies). And if you're a big player the published costs are not what you're paying.
Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper
#20> It's hard to come to a firm conclusion since pricing data is held very secretly (AWS quickly deletes announcements of historical price decreases). That's not correct. Here is the history of every (properly tagged) price reduction AWS ever announced: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction/
Those blog posts are a good start. I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class. AFAIK there are some third parties that track the granular data, but it's not preserved anywhere on the AWS page. A lot of price decreases also might have happened silently (without a blog post) or as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price").
> I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class.
You were referring to the announcements and these announcements are still available.
The actual pricing pages of course only show current prices. What would be the motivation for AWS to show outdated prices there as well? No other company I can think of does that and given the complexity of the pricing structure for AWS services that'd only confuse users even more.
> A lot of price decreases also might have happened silently (without a blog post)
Do you have an example for that or is this just hearsay?
> or as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price")
Privately negotiated deals aren't regular price reductions as they're only available for customers with a fairly large spend for such AWS services.