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S3 isn't getting cheaper

matt-rickard.com

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Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#141

Post by sonnyblarney »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #119
luhn wrote: post #106

AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…

This is how every market player is incentivized to behave, apart from regulatory authorities acting to prosecute monopolistic behavior. 1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible 2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position T…

No post body was provided.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#142

Post by staticassertion »

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…

That content has extreme temporal properties. An image that's uploaded is increasingly less likely to be accessed over time. You can probably store it on very cheap hardware with pretty serious compression.

Not to mention that it's mostly text and images that get uploaded to these sites. Videos are the worst case. Let's say there are 1 billion facebook accounts, each one uploads 1GB of data (seems huge), and let's assume that compression just cancels out replication.

That's 1,000 petabytes. On S3 that's in the low 6 figures per year, obviously ignoring the exfil/access costs.

That's not that much. Obviously you want to keep some of it "hot" - profile pictures, recently uploaded pictures, etc. Hand waving, assuming 1% of the data needs to stay hot (seems high), that's 10PB of data. Certainly you're in "big data" land but it's not like there aren't databases that'll handle it.

Not to mention FB invests in tech like zstd.

Cold storage is definitely still getting much cheaper. Dropbox SMR drives are pretty crazy: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-o...

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#143

Post by Spooky23 »

fleddr wrote: post #129
Spooky23 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I’m still in the datacenter storage business and our service delivery costs have been going down. You have to look at the service as a whole… nvme let us retire frames, etc. I think hyperscale margins are high, and I think between the many tiers of storage and backend technology they are constantly cooking cost out.

But still content keeps growing, and income per user won't. Doesn't that mean that at one point you're out of runway?

I don’t think so.

The highest speed storage is cheaper than ever and getting cheaper. That’s the expensive stuff. Our “big” high speed storage array was like $5M in 2012. Now it’s like 10x bigger, 5x faster, and 40% of the cost.

Bulk spinning disk prices drop at a slower rate but historically they are performance bound. The marginal byte of cold data has no marginal cost, as you always have lots of space on disks where you’re short on IO budget.

Really cold workloads that need to live on-prem for reasons and need to be retained for 30+ years can go even cheaper. That stuff lives on tape at a lower price point, like a half penny per raw gig.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#144

Post by h0l0cube »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #137
ineedasername wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd expect a significantly different scale. Specifically, I'd expect normal tiers ranging from "instant" to "several seconds", then a huge gap, then a rock bottom tape archive. From a more zoomed out look, you could simplify it to only two speeds. The fast speed taking 0-15 seconds, and the slow speed taking minutes to hours. Any content that's been accessed once or twice in the last week or month would be on the nor…

> There's not really anything between hard drives and tape for responsiveness, either existing or proposed, that I'm aware of. Nor is there anything slower than tapes.

It makes me wonder what a storage device would look like that is cheaper than HDD, similar or better storage density, and allows random access, with a trade-off for slower speed?

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#145

Post by [deleted] »

kortilla wrote: post #126
TimTheTinker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how every market player is incentivized to behave, apart from regulatory authorities acting to prosecute monopolistic behavior. 1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible 2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position T…

> This is why it's so important, especially in the US, for government to begin aggressively enforcing antitrust law again It already does and it didn’t particularly stop. The problem is that there is no obvious damage to consumers here (what US antitrust law is based on). GCP and Azure are both significant players with similar offerings. The fact that people use proprietary Amazon APIs to manage stuff isn’t a high en…

[deleted]

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#146

Post by h0l0cube »

AlexC04 wrote: post #117
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…

I don't think the article indicates that storage isn't getting cheaper. Equally possible is that amazon's S3 margins are getting better. For companies like Facebook and YouTube it is possible that they're not affected in the same way that a regular S3 customer would be.

> Equally possible is that amazon's S3 margins are getting better.

Which is acceptable if they're providing better value in features. From casually looking around it seems that Backblaze's B2 is much cheaper, but doesn't have a good story around reliability, namely uptime guarantees and simple multi-region redundancy. If Backblaze could match AWS in this regard, and with their Bandwidth Alliance with Cloudflare, they could provide better downward pressure on pricing.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#147

Post by fomine3 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #119
luhn wrote: post #106

AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…

This is how every market player is incentivized to behave, apart from regulatory authorities acting to prosecute monopolistic behavior. 1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible 2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position T…

It's hard lock-in rather than antitrust. I don't know what should be done.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#148

Post by pwarner »

zerocrates wrote: post #115
luhn wrote: post #106

AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…

I seemed to remember gp3 being (incrementally) cheaper than gp2... yeah, gp3 is 8 cents per GB-month vs 10 for gp2 in us-east-1. That's actually a reasonably significant price difference, now that I look at it.

There were use cases with gp2 where one would over provision capacity to get IOPS. gp3 let you just dial up IOPS which was much cheaper than over provisioning. This may seem a corner case, but it was moderately common. Also AWS should cut their prices, well in this environment maybe holding them is a cut....

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#149

Post by glenngillen »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #119
luhn wrote: post #106

AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…

This is how every market player is incentivized to behave, apart from regulatory authorities acting to prosecute monopolistic behavior. 1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible 2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position T…

Note: ex-AWS employee

The problem with the above narrative in this case (which I agree is generally true), is that's not what AWS did. If you look at the announcement history shared in a sibling comment you'll see that so much of it happened long before the cloud wars really heated up. I find that particularly curious. Is that because margins used to be very very fat and AWS just trimmed them down as economies of scale allowed in an attempt to (unsuccessfully) stave off competition? Is it just coincidence that the system found a natural level of margin efficiency right around when competitive pressures started to ramp up? Something else?

I have zero insight on why it has played out this way. I'd love to know though.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#150

Post by fomine3 »

h0l0cube wrote: post #144
Dylan16807 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect a significantly different scale. Specifically, I'd expect normal tiers ranging from "instant" to "several seconds", then a huge gap, then a rock bottom tape archive. From a more zoomed out look, you could simplify it to only two speeds. The fast speed taking 0-15 seconds, and the slow speed taking minutes to hours. Any content that's been accessed once or twice in the last week or month would be on the nor…

> There's not really anything between hard drives and tape for responsiveness, either existing or proposed, that I'm aware of. Nor is there anything slower than tapes. It makes me wonder what a storage device would look like that is cheaper than HDD, similar or better storage density, and allows random access, with a trade-off for slower speed?

Blu-ray disc?
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