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S3 isn't getting cheaper

matt-rickard.com

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Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#181

Post by Robotbeat »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #167
ineedasername wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that's what it would look like currently, but as content increases and the aggregate long tail of unpopular material grows ever larger there could be shifts in desirable storage solution characteristics that fit different economic niches. An extremely dense, extremely cheap, and extremely slow WORM storage device could find a place somewhere in the future. Cheap as in order(s) of magnitude less. The next im…

I don't really see a reason to prioritize content that hasn't been accessed in 2 months over content that hasn't been accessed in 200 months, when picking what tape to get next. Either way there is only one person waiting. And I'm already assuming the tapes are offline, because online tapes would just be a waste of money. Another issue is finding enough content suitable for very high latency systems. Right now they s…

Tape and cheap disk are about the same price per GB, but tape is more stable over long periods and doesn't have to be powered (although power for very large, slow and rarely accessed disk is low).

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#183

Post by safeerm »

Like the other comments mentioned your post misses of how transparent AWS has been in price reductions in the past.

More importantly, S3 now has several tiers of pricing depending on how frequently you access the data. So maybe lately they haven’t reduced the pricing of the top tier of S3 but they’ve made it significantly cheaper for other use cases of data. That is very contrary to the comments being made of innovators dilemma.

(I used to work at AWS but have no knowledge about pricing decisions)

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#184

Post by jamesfinlayson »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #70
snoopy_telex wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's easy to enter the market and offer a cheap product. It's hard to enter the market and offer a very solid product. It's nearly impossible to enter the market and provide the hundreds of services the big players can provide, and operate at the scale they can provide, servicing the number of markets and customers they do, with the level of support they do. The big players know that what separates the majors from th…

Very much this - I don't have much experience with providers in this space but Digital Ocean has taken maybe a decade to build and offer a small number of services.

That said, there is a lot of AWS that I probably wouldn't know existed - I know in my day job I make big use of maybe five services, plus maybe another 10 glue services between them (CloudWatch, IAM, VPC etc).

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#185

Post by weq »

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…

To the software wide of the equation --> open source is NOT the answer, abstractions ARE. The problem with programmers TODAY is that they take technical article written by a a cloud provider as gospel, and start slathering large layers of priority api calls/technical debt all over their solution - because thats what example code is designed todo, LOCK YOU IN. No need for contract nasties when your devs are doing the work for them!

Use an eggshell architecture, put your dependencies on the edge. global dependencies are the enermy.

For IAC, thats a slightly different story.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#186

Post by gerwim »

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…

Wasabi's egress is not fully free as you make it sound. Their egress works like this: if you store 1 TB of data, you have 1 TB of free egress, as seen in their FAQ [0]. This means it's unfit for certain cases and another competitor could be a better option.

[0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#187

Post by singron »

michael1999 wrote: post #39
YawningAngel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive question so I might be very wrong, but isn't postgres pretty flexible about objects now?

100/s is 3 billion per year. Postgres has a hard limit of 4 billion blobs in a column. that ignores the reality that RDS storage is comparatively expensive.

If you think a table might get anywhere near this size (blobs or not), I highly recommend table partitioning.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#189

Post by Dunedan »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #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 Z…

Your setup doesn't factor in labor cost and has a vastly lower durability.

That's not to say that S3 is superior compared to your setup, but it's a different solution for different needs.

Re: S3 isn't getting cheaper

#190

Post by nolok »

lstamour wrote: post #101
Dunedan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class. You were referring to the announcements and these announcements are still available. The actual pricing pages of course only show current prices. What would be the motivation for AWS to show outdated prices there as well? No other company I can think of does that and given the complexity of the pricing structure for AWS services th…

I can say that price _increases_ happened for a few AWS products in specific regions/countries without blog posts. Often AWS simply emails affected customers 1-3 months in advance and after making the change. That said, I imagine prices shifted due to currency, labour costs, energy costs or other regional concerns. And I’ve seen the opposite - I’ve seen AWS freeze prices and eat the cost differences long after they s…

I don't disagree with you but as parent said, op was talking specifically about decreases.
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