S3 isn't getting cheaper • Hacker News Board

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#91

Post by notatoad » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: 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…

storage price continues to decrease. the point is that S3 price doesn't drop at close to the same rate. facebook and youtube aren't hosting on S3, so they get to experience the real decreases in storage cost.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#92

Post by themitigating » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

rsstack wrote: post #35

rckrd wrote: 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 was at two companies that negotiated data transfer rates with a minimum commitment . I think one was $0.01/GB min of 5PB a month.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#93

Post by themitigating » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

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?

Is that what S3 is for?

I've used it to store large datasets that are processed within a region, a backup system, logs and metrics, and as an origin for CloudFront. I think you're referring to using to host a consumer download service because of web objects in a serious business you'll need a CDN.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#94

Post by ReactiveJelly » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

gsanderson wrote: post #48

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?

The margin on bandwidth is enormous. I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back. But there are rivals providing cheaper S3-compatible storage at scale. Cloudflare's R2 ($15/TB, and no fees for egress). Oracle Cloud Storage ($25/TB, and first 10TB of egress is free). There's Wasabi ($5.99/TB, and no fees for egress or API requests). To name but three. Of course each of those have drawbacks e.g Wasabi is…

> I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back

I remember! They called it the Bandwidth Alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#95

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

fleddr wrote: 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.

There would be exabytes of content on youtube over 5 years old with under 20 views. Stuff no one will miss when its gone.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#96

Post by themitigating » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #73

rckrd wrote: 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").

> Those blog posts are a good start. I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class. 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”.

If that's his core argument then it undermines the entire blog post right? Not to mention it calls into question other information he's provided .All AWS pricing is available publicly , saying the prices are "held very secretly" and being obviously wrong isn't a good look.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#97

Post by epolanski » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #18

Cloudflare's entry into this market will be interesting no bandwidth costs might put real pressure on AWS to get reasonable with it's pricing. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/

That sounds a lot like "let's hope the new AMD GPUs will be priced low so Nvidia will cut their prices"

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#98

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

flatiron wrote: post #81

prepend wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#99

Post by epolanski » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

snoopy_telex wrote: post #10

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.

Why haven't there been a upstart taking market share? Why do only the big players get into the game and hold similar costs?

Because infrastructure is not that high of cost for most companies and every dev and devops out there knows AWS and has no clue how competitore dashboards even look like.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#100

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #93

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?

Is that what S3 is for? I've used it to store large datasets that are processed within a region, a backup system, logs and metrics, and as an origin for CloudFront. I think you're referring to using to host a consumer download service because of web objects in a serious business you'll need a CDN.

All S3 usage I have encountered in the wild has been user submitted files. Stuff like profile pics, document attachments, etc. You could in theory store these on the VMs storage but that encounters the frequent problem that the storage fills up. While S3 is unlimited and easy to integrate.