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Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

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Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#111

Post by res0nat0r »

baddox wrote: post #105
chimeracoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very hard for them to do. For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours. Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?…

> Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)? If you have opted in for the "don't let me spend more than $x," then yes.

I'd say the more intelligent way to head any of this off is to create billing alerts which you can now do and set it to page / email / post to an endpoint when you reach $X or X% of whatever worries you.

Create tiers of things that email / SMS additional people as the numbers go up if you want to be very careful etc...

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#112

Post by MichaelApproved »

janson0 wrote: post #109
tedivm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion they're doing that on purpose to discourage people from using S3 as both a storage and a transfer method. Storage and Delivery should be considered separate, as there are benefits to it being a separate service. If you throw a CDN between your customers and S3 you'll not only get a significantly lower cost, you'll also give your customers much better performance.

I just did some price comparison. It looks like cloudfront is actually the same price as data transfer out of S3, but in addition you have to tack on a $.02/GB fee to get the data to your cloudfront edge nodes. If I am wrong about this (and I hope I am), where can I find more information about that? Thanks!

No, you're right. I use cloud front and you have to pay for the day at to go from S3 to cloud front servers where it gets cached. Then the costs are $0.14/gb in the cheapest region.

If your cache gets deleted or expired, you'll have to pay to move the data (at s3 rates) to the CDN again when someone requests it.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#113

Post by sandstrom »

IgorPartola wrote: post #83

This almost brings it down to where I can start backing things up onto S3. Currently my home NAS houses just under 500 GB's of stuff. My requirements to back this up offsite would be (1) full encryption of each file and filename using a key only I hold and (2) reasonable per-month price to where I cannot justify just buying another box with a bunch of drives and sticking them at a friend's house. I believe I can solv…

I'd recommend Arq (a great backup product for OS X).

It requires some technical chops to setup, but I doubt that would be a problem for you (or other people on HN).

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#114

Post by Fasebook »

carlosdp wrote: post #49
chimeracoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very hard for them to do. For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours. Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?…

Yea any intelligent bill limiting needs to be done with context into what each instance is doing. It's possible for them to implement something that can handle that, using tags and such, but I would rather they spent that time improving reliability infrastructure. It's not terribly difficult to implement one's own bill limiting system using the API.

It seems impossible for a single solution here. One business would rather see instances go down, another might need ledger logs no matter what and would rather turn down customers at the door, etc.,

The right way to do it (currently) is to model the costs yourself and tie it in with your operational automation, then determine what your best course of action would be during a shitstorm. Generally, I would wager the best option is to replace your front page with a static html "overwhelming response" page, maybe with some light vector graphics.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#115

Post by jpatel3 »

callmeed wrote: post #16

It would be interesting to go back through the Everpix post mortem docs[1] and see if a big price swing like this could have put them in the black (or close to it). [1] https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence

Its one of the factor, but it's not the only thing which can put them in the black.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#116

Post by res0nat0r »

janson0 wrote: post #109
tedivm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion they're doing that on purpose to discourage people from using S3 as both a storage and a transfer method. Storage and Delivery should be considered separate, as there are benefits to it being a separate service. If you throw a CDN between your customers and S3 you'll not only get a significantly lower cost, you'll also give your customers much better performance.

I just did some price comparison. It looks like cloudfront is actually the same price as data transfer out of S3, but in addition you have to tack on a $.02/GB fee to get the data to your cloudfront edge nodes. If I am wrong about this (and I hope I am), where can I find more information about that? Thanks!

Cloudfront actually becomes cheaper than S3 once you start scaling up to large amounts of data, plus you get the added speed benefit.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#117

Post by sdesol »

icelancer wrote: post #92
paulrosenzweig wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much bandwidth are you using? I'd wonder if they throttle you at some point. I'm sure they're not expecting people to use that whole TB.

I use multiple instances (20-40) of 1 TB bandwidth pretty regularly with no throttling as of yet.

Yeah I think they realize, like most vendors, that most people don't even come remotely close to using that much bandwidth. Even using them as a proxy for nextflix will probably just end up being 300G a month.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#118

Post by mjn »

chimeracoder wrote: post #36
copergi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the upside?

Glacier's pricing is actually very difficult to calculate. If you only ever store data (and never retrieve it), it's easy, but the moment you need to start accessing it, the pricing is actually very difficult to calculate correctly: > Unlike every other service Amazon provides, with Glacier you're not paying for your net usage throughout each month: Instead, you're paying for your peak hour — and once that peak hour…

It's true that Glacier is a bit tricky, but you can easily cap your retrieval costs (with a bit of margin) if your use-case allows you to choose a maximum retrieval rate, rather than thinking in terms of retrieval amount. If your peak hourly retrieval rate for a month is N Mbps, your cost is no more than $3N. So for example, $30 for a month that includes 10 Mbps retrievals, $300 for 100 Mbps retrievals, etc.

A bit more detail in an older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147325

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#119

Post by computer »

seanmccann wrote: post #64
callmeed wrote: post #16

It would be interesting to go back through the Everpix post mortem docs[1] and see if a big price swing like this could have put them in the black (or close to it). [1] https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence

That's no different than startups of the past having to pay thousands to millions of dollars to setup servers. These days those same servers can be setup in minutes for a fraction of the cost. Timing is everything. Sometimes the current market pricing for a commodity is too expensive to make your business viable today but in the future that will not be the case. Just depends how long that will take.

If S3 storage pricing was the issue for this startup they could always have gone with their own dedicated servers for storage for a fraction of the cost. For that reason, I doubt a lower S3 cost would have prevented them from shutting down.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#120

Post by IgorPartola »

deftnerd wrote: post #106
IgorPartola wrote: post #83

This almost brings it down to where I can start backing things up onto S3. Currently my home NAS houses just under 500 GB's of stuff. My requirements to back this up offsite would be (1) full encryption of each file and filename using a key only I hold and (2) reasonable per-month price to where I cannot justify just buying another box with a bunch of drives and sticking them at a friend's house. I believe I can solv…

BackBlaze is pretty popular with the HN crowd and their pricing is still $5 a month for unlimited backup space.

Back blaze is out for two reasons: no Linux support and unlimited backups. I want to know exactly how much storage I can use up before hitting some abuse policy.
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