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Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

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Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#31

Post by dilyevsky »

mannyv wrote: post #24

Cloud bandwidth is cheap if you commit to spending a certain amount per month. Our bandwidth is less than .001/GB with like a $1500 monthly commitment in AWS. Fastly was even cheaper (which is why we're using fastly). Call you AM and talk. It's not hard, and it'll save you a ton of money.

We had a commit that was like three orders of magnitude more and our price was 1-2c for cdn and 2c for tier1 cloud (but only “partner” networks, the rest was list). That was after us threatening to leave (and having capability to do so). So either you are mistaken or your am really really likes you.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#32

Post by toast0 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #9
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #6

TL;DR - author claims the hardest part of running a cloud PaaS is networking, thus the cloud providers charge you a ton for egress to outsource the optimization problem to you. It's not clear to me this claim is true - they're in the business of solving exactly this optimization problem - and they have, they're just capturing maximum profit. If it was really the hardest / most costly - then other providers wouldn't b…

??? This is obviously true. The bandwidth available in a geographic location is, practically speaking, limited. Roads are cheap to pave, but if there was congestion 24/7 and you paved all you could, then you would need to start rationing road usage. For a business the best way to ration is to charge more. Solving this problem requires a massive amount of engineering work, which would also justify the increased cost.

Bandwidth in a geographic location is certainly limited... there's only so many fiber strands available, and fiber transceivers only go up to a certain speed, +/- wave division; there's costs of transceivers and what not. But in most places where you'll find datacenters, the limit is rather high. It's also usually possible to run more fiber.

If you take a look at the Seattle Internet Exchange [1] which is pretty public about their operations, they've got a router with 2x 36-port 400gbe line cards; three member facing 400gbe connections, 163 member facing 100gbe connections. That's a huge amount of bandwidth available at the exchange, some (perhaps much) of which is then delivered by the member to fiber that goes elsewhere. And SIX isn't the only peering location in the Seattle metro.

SIX's traffic graph shows a peak of 2.8 Tbps; AMS-IX's graph shows a peak of 11.7 Tbps, AMS-IX doesn't offer 400 gbe though, but needing more than 100 gbps in one location is pretty rare.

[1] https://www.seattleix.net/

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#33

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Syonyk wrote: post #20

What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense. My personal box is a 6C/12T Xeon from a few years back, 128GB ECC RAM, and about 24TB usable disk plus 2TB NVMe, for running a lot of other VMs that I run actual services in (remote backup, my web presence, communications, game servers,…

If you want bandwidth, vps are quite cheap. 100Mbps averages to a a little over 32TB/mo. There there's tons of low CPU low ram systems with 32TB/mo transfer for cheap. Now under $10/mo: https://lowendbox.com/blog/hosteons-they-survived-dedipath-a...

People should rack their own rpi5 or nucs, at least. There's various providers for both. And consider moving up from there. The remaining folks who will accept & rack a mid tower box for under $75 are saints.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#34

Post by proteal »

One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your account. $5k may be a lot to an individual, but the cloud provider’s costs for that service are significantly less and they shouldn’t mind forgiving the charge. Case in point, when the author deleted his account and switched providers, the old host didn’t chase him for the charges.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#35

Post by swatcoder »

Syonyk wrote: post #20

What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense. My personal box is a 6C/12T Xeon from a few years back, 128GB ECC RAM, and about 24TB usable disk plus 2TB NVMe, for running a lot of other VMs that I run actual services in (remote backup, my web presence, communications, game servers,…

Heathen! Not everyone can afford that PhD in enterprise class hardware management you must have earned to pull this off. And besides, what are you going to do when you wake up tomorrow and you're the next FAANG? You'll never scale to 2B DAU on that box and we all need to be ready for that, just in case. I knew a guy who knew a guy who founded a FAANG, so it could happen to you too. You have to be ready!

/s

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#36

Post by hotnfresh »

api wrote: post #13

Based on the pricing you see at VPS providers, bare metal providers, and colocation, I have long called BS on large cloud provider bandwidth pricing. It's completely insane, like more than 10X higher than VPSes and more than 100-1000X higher than wholesale (bare metal and colo). Take this for example: https://www.fdcservers.com/ That company is profitable, which means they have to be paying less than this for bandwid…

One complicating factor of egress is that it's not all created equal. Some providers have really good peering agreements. Others (even some big players...) have bad ones. Some cheaper-than-AWS options aren't really selling the same thing.

It's really hard to evaluate that before you hit issues in production, too.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#37

Post by mknocker »

Syonyk wrote: post #20

What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense. My personal box is a 6C/12T Xeon from a few years back, 128GB ECC RAM, and about 24TB usable disk plus 2TB NVMe, for running a lot of other VMs that I run actual services in (remote backup, my web presence, communications, game servers,…

I am thinking about doing something similar. Out of curiosity, do you use a reverse proxy web server to protect from malicious attacks ? That`s probably the only part I would think of leaving in the cloud if I were to host my own servers at home.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#38

Post by washadjeffmad »

Syonyk wrote: post #20

What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense. My personal box is a 6C/12T Xeon from a few years back, 128GB ECC RAM, and about 24TB usable disk plus 2TB NVMe, for running a lot of other VMs that I run actual services in (remote backup, my web presence, communications, game servers,…

> My personal box ... for a bit over $100/mo.

Is that just $50/U?

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#40

Post by stickfigure »

Cloudflare R2 (their S3 clone) has free egress.

We are in the middle of migrating about 5TB of fairly active data from Google Cloud Storage to R2. For years now, most of our cloud bill has been egress from GCS. Activity spiked recently and doing something about it became urgent.

R2 has an S3-compatible API (we're using the Amazon-provided S3 Java SDK). Storage is 25% cheaper than GCS standard. Making our code multi-provider was pretty easy. I'm actually looking forward to next month's hosting bill.

I feel like I'm slowly getting pushed off of GCP due to pricing. Last year we moved some stateless image processing infrastructure to AWS Elastic Beanstalk because RAM is much, much cheaper there.

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