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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

#161

Post by garethl »

computer wrote: post #119
seanmccann wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure how you can compare your own servers to s3 - s3 has redundancy built in that can survive the loss of 2 data centers. I'm pretty sure it would be more expensive to roll your own version of that...

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#163

Post by donavanm »

TillE wrote: post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

Lets put some math on the network costs. An oft quoted cost is $1/mb at p95 for decent transit. 1 mbs * 2,592,000 seconds = 2,592,000 mb per month, / (8 * 1024 gigabytes) = 316GB transferred per month. Dividing our $1 / 316GB = $0.0031 per GB transferred _at a constant 1mbs_.

However most networks have sine wave pattern diurnal utilization. A common peak to average ration would be 3:1. Our $0.0031 is effectively the rate for an average of 1mbs. To get that average rate we'll be paying about 3x, or $0.0093 per GB transferred. So we're paying $0.01 per GB for the transit alone. This is also in a major metro area in North America. Transit costs can easily be 3-10x in EU or 10-20x in AP.

On top of that there's capex and opex for that 10gb port. Assuming you've got some decent scale you're going to get 96 10gb ports in a $300,000 to $500,000 router, or $3-5,000 per 10gb port. You need ports both north and south, so you get 480gbs throughput per chassis. But you can't run above 80% util, so call it 384gbs of peak throughput. Opex for rack position, data techs, power, etc will cost $2,000 to $5,000 per month. Amortized over 36 months let's call it $10,000 to $17,000 per month all up.

That 384gbs peak throughput is actually more like 128gbs averaged over the month. At 128gb/s average we transfer about 41,472,000 GB per month, or $0.00024 to $0.00041 per GB. Now double that cost 'cause routers actually come in pairs for fault tolerance. So we're paying $0.0005 to $0.0008 per GB of transit connectivity.

And how many hops are there back to your application? I'd hazard around 6 by the time you go transit -> edge -> border -> core -> dc -> agg -> tor. Paying for that internal network infrastructure is going to add $0.0030 to $0.0050 to our bill. All up that gets us to $0.0128 to $0.0151 per GB transferred from our host to a third party network.

Expanding the error bars lets round to $0.01 to $0.02 of network costs per GB that we deliver. To get these prices you're going to have a capital budget of tens of millions per year. OpEx would be at least $500K, or more likely a million plus, per month. If you can actually beat my pricing I'm hiring and or would like to subscribe to your news letter.

Apologies if I missed something in the math. I had to do some mental acrobatics to go from dollars per gb/s to dollars per GB/month.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#164

Post by einhverfr »

_wesley_ wrote: post #130
programminggeek wrote: post #11

Nothing should ever be announced or "effective" April 1.

I launched a company once on April 1. Realized the date after we'd announced to everyone. We were worried about it impacting launch (is this a joke?), but all was good.

April 1 is not celebrated everywhere in the world.

I learned that April 1 jokes on the internet are often taken the wrong way even when there are ample reasons to realize it is a joke.

See http://osdir.com/ml/finance.ledger.smb.devel/2008-04/msg0000...

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#165

Post by hrrsn »

hahahafail wrote: post #88
opendais wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have been enough for them to keep investor interest [new round of funding] and continue. It wouldn't have put them in the black. https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/... From that, it looks like their loss over 26 months was ~$300,000. Their total AWS costs was less than $400,000 over the same period. Downloading 1 GB = 4x the cost of the S3 storage at the reduced prices. If everything…

very cool repository, found the S3 data here: https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/... So basically at their peak, they had ~174TB S3 and ~47TB S3 RRS. That month cost them ~$16.2k, whereas after April 1 they could have put everything in S3 for ~$6.7k. That's a big difference, but they were still getting taken to the cleaners over some other services like RDS.

Why wouldn't they put all of that in a Backblaze Storage Pod? 2 months of AWS costs could've built more than 2 pods and stored everything with plenty of space to spare.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#166

Post by jhh »

bobbles wrote: post #150
IgorPartola wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isnt backblaze unlimited storage? I thought that was their main feature.

IgorPartola means that it is exactly this "unlimited" policy which chills her. She speculates (or knows) that there is some unspokenen abuse limit and she fears that she might hit it at some point.

I don't think this is relevant for you if you have less than a few Terabytes of data.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#167

Post by thinkindie »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #157
Rifu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you happen to have recommendations for other CDN services?

Akamai on the high end, Fastly for a startup or mid-sized business.

looks like that fastly and cloudfront pricing is not that much different, they apply pretty much the same prices for traffic and requests in each of their zones.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ https://www.fastly.com/pricing

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#168

Post by easy_rider »

thomaslangston wrote: post #8

My concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they "think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use their service at any usage based price other than free.

I accidentally setup EC2's in another Region (and effectively "forgot" about them. Woke up with a 1.2k invoice + $250 more in charges for March.

Amazon voided all charges without question. Their level of customer support is off the charts. But AWS would never be my first pick to start up something. Your costs will be way way lower when going dedicated. Obviously you should be able to scale, but I think startups generally overestimate their success when it comes to that, and wasting a lot of money for things they have no use for yet.

You could have your AWS deployment strategies ready for when the need would arise..

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#169

Post by tiquorsj »

computer wrote: post #119
seanmccann wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no way to replicate S3s full service level at a fraction of the cost. You can store the data pretty cheaply, but you can't replicate the full service level anywhere near as inexpensively. Especially the redundancy, vesioning and durability.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#170

Post by tiquorsj »

vidarh wrote: post #151
rjurney wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraction of the cost long-term. Not short term, where they found themselves.

Renting dedicated servers with lots of disk has typically been vastly cheaper than S3 "forever" on a monthly contract basis, so there are plenty of options before going the route of bare metal in your own rack. But even renting space by the 1U and leasing servers directly adds surprisingly little overhead.

I'm not sure where you get that data, but it doesn't match anything I've found in the 27 dates centers we do business in. Storage, versioning, redundancy, durability and geographic availability. That is the core of S3, not just storage.
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