71–80 of 215 posts
I suspect it might be an issue of "cheap enough". For smaller Projects, the s3 storage cost doesn't matter too much. Medium sized projects may find the tradeoff between price vs cost of a custom solution to still be more than good enough. Large enough projects simply chose a different, more specialized solution anyway
Big projects get custom discounts; there's a whole different pricing game for huge customers.
all amazon services seem so expensive, hundreds of dollars/ month bills easily for running a few large ec2 servers all month.
we use aws at work, but been running side projects on digital ocean for years for way less than hundreds a month
> 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").
This is not a good look.
From your blog post:
> It's hard to come to a firm conclusion since pricing data is held very secretly (AWS quickly deletes announcements of historical price decreases).
There’s nothing wrong with “I missed that. Thanks, let me update the blog”.
Storage price reductions slowing down or even coming to a halt makes me wonder what this means for "infinite storage" companies. I'm talking services like Facebook, Youtube, that are "free" (ad supported) where on a daily basis an absurd amount of new content is added, yet almost nothing ever removed. If storage needs grow endlessly yet storage costs stopped going down, wouldn't that mean that the model in the long t…
Or compression/deduplication.
As long as they have consistent ad revenue, they’ll be ok.
Storage price reductions slowing down or even coming to a halt makes me wonder what this means for "infinite storage" companies. I'm talking services like Facebook, Youtube, that are "free" (ad supported) where on a daily basis an absurd amount of new content is added, yet almost nothing ever removed. If storage needs grow endlessly yet storage costs stopped going down, wouldn't that mean that the model in the long t…
I think hyperscale margins are high, and I think between the many tiers of storage and backend technology they are constantly cooking cost out.
Storage price reductions slowing down or even coming to a halt makes me wonder what this means for "infinite storage" companies. I'm talking services like Facebook, Youtube, that are "free" (ad supported) where on a daily basis an absurd amount of new content is added, yet almost nothing ever removed. If storage needs grow endlessly yet storage costs stopped going down, wouldn't that mean that the model in the long t…
What happened in 2012 to bump the hard drive prices?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which raises my question: Is there some open source github project that lets you create an S3 API compatible with underlying heterogeneous VPS hosts clustered? I'm guessing even with this storage would still be expensive, so how does Backblaze pull this off?
Yes, several. Minio is the big one but I believe Ceph can do this too. Others exist. Disk is cheap. Real cheap.
Perhaps irrational but can't argue with the peace of mind that expensive clouds offer. Although we've seen misconfigured S3 buckets leaking data so.