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S3 isn't getting cheaper

matt-rickard.com

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Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#31

Post by judge2020 »

rckrd wrote: post #14
fxtentacle wrote: post #11

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?

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...

This is the entire point of the egress fees. If you can keep traffic inside AWS it's basically free. Getting it out costs money.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#32

Post by Sebb767 »

> Even with a slowdown of Moore's Law, it seems like AWS has a healthy margin to continue to offer strategic price cuts only when necessary.

Which doesn't surprise me much, really. If your customers are mostly stuck with you, competition is sparse and people pay the price you demand - why would you reduce prices?

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#33

Post by tpmx »

fxtentacle wrote: post #11

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?

I think this would be an excellent area for regulation since it anti-competitive (portability is dramatically reduced since it has been made artifically expensive to move the data to another cloud service) and the cloud services haven't shown any interest in doing something about it on their own.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#34

Post by advisedwang »

Hard disks have been getting larger capacity but i/o capability is fairly flat. The result is that price/GB is dropping but price/iops is not. So _cold_ storage is where you would expect to see pricing fall. I don't follows AWS pricing closely but I've seen a lot of news around Glacier over the year so that might reflect this fact.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#35

Post by rsstack »

rckrd wrote: post #13
Dunedan wrote: post #8

> 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").

> as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price").

Widely, AWS doesn't negotiate on pricing. Small business get the list price or they can switch to another cloud. Medium and large businesses (from 100 employees to Fortune 500) get blanket discounts (excl. some specific line items) in exchange for a spend commitment, e.g. if you commit to at least $10M AWS spend per year, you'll get a 10% discount for all your spend. It doesn't give different discounts to S3 compared to other AWS products.

Do unique top-top-tier customers of AWS get special S3 pricing? Nice for them, but it isn't _widely_.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#36

Post by tnolet »

YawningAngel wrote: post #30
tnolet wrote: post #24

For my company, neither egress nor storage cost are the big issue. It’s the API call (PUT) cost. We deal with payloads that are just a little too big for a database (we run Postgres and Clickhouse) but just too frequent (~100 per second) and small (think largish json blobs) to be effective on S3. We are write heavy. Reads are probably 1% but need to be instant for a good UI and API experience.

This is a very naive question so I might be very wrong, but isn't postgres pretty flexible about objects now?

Yes, but it does blow up TOAST and has a lot of impact on the deletion behavior on busy tables. We removed all larger json blobs from PG. typical settings or config stuff in json in PG are fine. We use that all the time. But larger json blobs of several kilobytes are still an issue for semi timeseries data.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#37

Post by sfe22 »

tpmx wrote: post #33
fxtentacle wrote: post #11

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?

I think this would be an excellent area for regulation since it anti-competitive (portability is dramatically reduced since it has been made artifically expensive to move the data to another cloud service) and the cloud services haven't shown any interest in doing something about it on their own.

Are you seriously suggesting that S3 is a monopoly with means to block competition. I mean even when discussing cloud in general, what you are suggesting is a joke.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#38

Post by Sebb767 »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

all amazon services seem so expensive, hundreds of dollars/ month bills easily for running a few large ec2 servers all month.

AWS is great if you have lots of money and little time. Which was very true in the last ~decade, where we had lots of venture funded startups that had very much money, but little time.

Also, while you definitely pay a markup, the standard EC2 pricing also contains instant availability. If you skip on buying a car and instead pay a taxi to wait 24/7, your costs will also be insanely high. Additionally, AWS provides a great ecosystem where your app can easily be managed in - things like getting a https certificate, setting up a redundant load balancer and even a CDN, database or a Kubernetes cluster can be made simply with a few clicks in an UI. If you don't have someone who knows how to configure those services, it can detract a lot from what you're actually trying to do as a business. Lastly, it has all these enterprise features you suddenly need - solid billing, encryption, certificates etc..

Don't get me wrong, it's expensive, but there's a reason so many businesses use AWS.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#39

Post by michael1999 »

YawningAngel wrote: post #30
tnolet wrote: post #24

For my company, neither egress nor storage cost are the big issue. It’s the API call (PUT) cost. We deal with payloads that are just a little too big for a database (we run Postgres and Clickhouse) but just too frequent (~100 per second) and small (think largish json blobs) to be effective on S3. We are write heavy. Reads are probably 1% but need to be instant for a good UI and API experience.

This is a very naive question so I might be very wrong, but isn't postgres pretty flexible about objects now?

100/s is 3 billion per year. Postgres has a hard limit of 4 billion blobs in a column.

that ignores the reality that RDS storage is comparatively expensive.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#40

Post by tpmx »

sfe22 wrote: post #37
tpmx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this would be an excellent area for regulation since it anti-competitive (portability is dramatically reduced since it has been made artifically expensive to move the data to another cloud service) and the cloud services haven't shown any interest in doing something about it on their own.

Are you seriously suggesting that S3 is a monopoly with means to block competition. I mean even when discussing cloud in general, what you are suggesting is a joke.

Anti-competitive practices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices) don't require a monopoly.
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