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S3 isn't getting cheaper

matt-rickard.com

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Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#81
post #74
post #68

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…

If storage lifetime is increasing it might not be so bad. Or compression/deduplication. As long as they have consistent ad revenue, they’ll be ok.

I wouldn’t believe dedupe would be a big thing with social media user created content.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#82
post #35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW $10M is at least 1 order of magnitude, and in some cases 2 orders of magnitude higher than necessary in order to negotiate discounts, depending on services used.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#83
post #35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don‘t know about S3 specifically but with a large enough consumption you can negotiate a specific rate card for individual AWS services in addition your Enterprise discount.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#84
post #68

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…

Once ancient content no longer produces enough ad revenue for the companies storing it, I suspect they will support it only in paid tiers for users who really want it. Something like this is already happening in Google's paid tiers: each user is valuable as part of Google's advertising audience, but the economics no longer make sense once those users keep many GB on Google's servers.

Ancient content can be moved away from edge servers and more to archival.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#85
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.

> For my company, neither egress nor storage cost are the big issue. It’s the API call (PUT) cost.

> We are write heavy. Reads are probably 1% but need to be instant for a good UI and API experience.

It sounds like the recently released OVH High Performance Object Storage[1] might be a good fit.

It has better performance than S3[2], completely free API calls, and $0.015 / GB egress.

[1] https://corporate.ovhcloud.com/en/newsroom/news/high-perform...

[2] https://blog.ovhcloud.com/what-is-the-real-performance-of-th...

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once ancient content no longer produces enough ad revenue for the companies storing it, I suspect they will support it only in paid tiers for users who really want it. Something like this is already happening in Google's paid tiers: each user is valuable as part of Google's advertising audience, but the economics no longer make sense once those users keep many GB on Google's servers.

Ancient content can be moved away from edge servers and more to archival.

already happening. ever notice youtube videos with low view counts take a really long time to load?

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#87
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blackblaze reliability and performance are below aws, same for bunny cdn. Although I understand it can be interesting for some use cases where perf/reliability is not critical.

Can you cite your sources? AWS "reliability" has been the direct cause of a number of sleepless nights for me over the years. Comparing to a few years ago when I worked on a large-scale product hosted on bare metal servers that worked beautifully, I don't think AWS is all it is hyped up to be. Anecdotal, I know, but even with no experience using Backblaze or Bunny, the bar they would have to meet is a lot lower than…

I'm talking about my personal experience, on blackblaze the number of 500 errors was simply not acceptable for my use case, likewise for performance and latency. I was a bit disappointed by bunny cdn rps/latency. But indeed price is not at all comparable.

Also I'm not talking about any aws service but more specifically about S3 a d CloudFront.

Finally, as I said above those blackblaze and bunny are amazing if you try to optimize the cost as your main goal.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#88
post #68

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…

This is a huge concern for me too. I suspect that FB and Youtube will start auto-deleting old content that people haven't seen in the last X months.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancient content can be moved away from edge servers and more to archival.

already happening. ever notice youtube videos with low view counts take a really long time to load?

Presages an interesting digital future in which nothing ever truly goes away, it just gets slower and slower. An endless inner migration that never quite hits the stopping point, and which could theoretically be reversed if only the slowed content garnered enough attention.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once ancient content no longer produces enough ad revenue for the companies storing it, I suspect they will support it only in paid tiers for users who really want it. Something like this is already happening in Google's paid tiers: each user is valuable as part of Google's advertising audience, but the economics no longer make sense once those users keep many GB on Google's servers.

Ancient content can be moved away from edge servers and more to archival.

This already happens at YT. It's pretty common knowledge that after 300 views, the handling of a video changes a lot, including moving from a cheap storage medium to the media used for popular content.
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