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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

11–20 of 268 posts

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#11
post #10

An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte egress fees. Or just rent cloud servers from one of the many much cheaper VPS hosting services and don’t use all the expensive and complex cloud services all designed to lock you in and drain cash from your at 9 or 12 or 17 cents per gigabyte. Seriously, if you…

> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fl…

>> This whole "cloud bad" is just childish.

Not childish…. it’s a growing line of thought in the IT community that has bought the cloud sell unquestioningly for 20 years.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#13
post #10

An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte egress fees. Or just rent cloud servers from one of the many much cheaper VPS hosting services and don’t use all the expensive and complex cloud services all designed to lock you in and drain cash from your at 9 or 12 or 17 cents per gigabyte. Seriously, if you…

> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fl…

The cloud is better and worse than bare metal. It depends on the use case.

AWS is Kafkaesque though

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fl…

>> This whole "cloud bad" is just childish. Not childish…. it’s a growing line of thought in the IT community that has bought the cloud sell unquestioningly for 20 years.

But it's the same mindset as "cloud good", which was also a growing line of thought once. Mantras aren't useful; tradeoff analysis is useful.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#16
If you're a heavy bandwidth user it's worth looking at Leaseweb, PhoenixNAP, Hetzner, OVH, and others who have ridiculously cheaper bandwidth pricing.

I remember a bizarre situation where the AWS sales guys wouldn't budge on bandwidth pricing even though the company wouldn't be viable at the standard prices.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#17
post #5

An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte egress fees. Or just rent cloud servers from one of the many much cheaper VPS hosting services and don’t use all the expensive and complex cloud services all designed to lock you in and drain cash from your at 9 or 12 or 17 cents per gigabyte. Seriously, if you…

Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?

OVH (except for APAC data centers), I think Scaleway also has bandwidth included.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#18
post #2

S3 is a nice trick. More tricks: 1. Ask for discounts if you are a big AWS customer (e.g., spend $1mln+/year). At some point, they were huge for inter-AZ transfers. 2. Put things in one AZ. Running DB in "b" zone and your only server in "a" is even worse than just standardizing on one zone. 3. When using multiple AZ do load aware AZ balancing.

> Running DB in "b" zone and your only server in "a"

There must be use cases for this, but I lack imagination. Cost? But not cost?

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#20

This is a loophole. Hitting some loss leader at AWS, but if everyone only buys the $1 hotdog and nothing else then the $1 hotdog gets removed.

I'm not sure how this could be removed - the fundamentals behind it are basic building blocks of S3.

Maybe raising the cost of transient storage? e.g. If you have to pay for a minimum of a day's storage - but even if that was the case this would still be cost-effective, and at any rate it seems very unnatural for AWS to charge on such granularity.

+ I would guess that S3 is orders of magnitude more profitable for AWS than cross-AZ charges, so I'm not sure they'd consider it a loss-leader.

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