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S3 isn't getting cheaper

matt-rickard.com

171–180 of 215 posts

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

They cost more than a hard drive and are less dense. And those "archival disc" cartridges Sony makes are even more expensive, with drives that cost more than tape drives.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Unfortunately, even putting eight double-sided discs in a cartridge only gives you 5.5 TB which is a joke compared to 26 TB hard disks. It costs a fortune as well. https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/optical-disc-archive-cartrid...

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#173

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…

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 sca…

Seems likely that the competitors they were trying to dig into were on-prem/leased machine incumbents more than the nascent cloud competitors, though? Trying to build the brand of "Cloud" as an alternative, to the point where now it's practically the default choice for big enterprise/government customers. They combined that with extremely aggressive credit packages to get startups while they were young, so they would adopt the various services rather than building out their own infra on bare metal and saving a bundle long term.

Though making it harder for cloud competitors was certainly good for them as well.

It's like with any startup, your biggest competitor is what people do currently, not necessarily another company, let alone another startup. For many software startups, the biggest competitor is something like pen and paper, excel, standard email, etc.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#174
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it so highly ironic that anyone truly believes this would end up better. They would not fight over customers, in the same way the breakup of AT&T did not result in a fight over customers - only a more complete, nimble, and effective domination of the entire US that lasts to this day. These companies are hamstrung by their size and internal cultural infighting - you will break them into much more effective unit…

I'm unconvinced that breaking them up is a good thing or not. But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each other (that makes no sense because you'd break them up along business lines where they don't compete anyway). Instead for me it is that it removes cross subsidies both financial (as in "we can give away this loss making application because we make so much money…

Yeah, you could kind of see this when Google started making Maps pay its own way, and started charging seriously for Maps API access - suddenly a host of decent alternatives sprang up, because they stopped sucking all of the oxygen out of the market.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#175
I cannot speak for the big companies, but for private cloud storage, I suggest to go the route for self-hosting, all the tools are available in 2022: ZFS for reliability, Proxmox for separation of concerns, Opnsense/pfsense for access control, Nextcloud for convenience (if you need such file sync at all). Add a photovoltaic plant and your electricity bill will be _Ok_ (you should do this anyway).

I have a 40 TB ZFS Z2 Pool consisting of 6x 8TB drives, and a 16TB offsite pool that is booted for backup snapshots weekly. You'll have to replace the 6 drives running 24/7 approximately every 5 years. If a drive costs $200.00, that will be $1200.00 per 5 years, or $20.00 per month. Add about $400.00 (with PV) to $800.00 (without) for electricity per year ($30.00/$60.00 monthly) and $7.00 monthly for UPS batteries. For these $57.00, you will get a full virtualization feature set under your control, not only a 30TB ingress data sink.

With Amazon Glacier, the cheapest "data sink" cloud storage, 30TB would equal $123.00 monthly (or $30.00 with S3 Glacier Deep Archive), with quite a few feature caveats.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#176

I cannot speak for the big companies, but for private cloud storage, I suggest to go the route for self-hosting, all the tools are available in 2022: ZFS for reliability, Proxmox for separation of concerns, Opnsense/pfsense for access control, Nextcloud for convenience (if you need such file sync at all). Add a photovoltaic plant and your electricity bill will be _Ok_ (you should do this anyway). I have a 40 TB ZFS Z…

I admire that setup, but it could read like an ad for S3.

Awesome for a hacker, but too much if you just want a lot of easy reliable storage.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#177

I cannot speak for the big companies, but for private cloud storage, I suggest to go the route for self-hosting, all the tools are available in 2022: ZFS for reliability, Proxmox for separation of concerns, Opnsense/pfsense for access control, Nextcloud for convenience (if you need such file sync at all). Add a photovoltaic plant and your electricity bill will be _Ok_ (you should do this anyway). I have a 40 TB ZFS Z…

I admire that setup, but it could read like an ad for S3. Awesome for a hacker, but too much if you just want a lot of easy reliable storage.

Easy reliable cheap

Pick two

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#178

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…

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

I suspect we'll arrive at a place as a society where regulators closely monitor use of protocols and require companies to fully support open protocols and network APIs.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Historians might miss it.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#180
post #169

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…

But AWS invented IaaS, started at 100% market share, lost market share for years, and is now below 40%. Egress pricing is anti-competitive but that's a different narrative.

Market share is alone isn't a valid metric IMO, especially in cloud where the industry still grows at breaking neck pace.

In fact invite other players to join you to heat up the capital market might be a beneficial deal, as it indicates interests.

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