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AWS free tier data transfer expansion

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Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#101

Post by swiftcoder »

orf wrote: post #87
swiftcoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still incur charges before the budget action kicks in and terminates your resources.

Ok so how would this work in any other way? Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? No, of course not. Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be delayed. But then you run into an issue: what if you end up costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in. Should you not pay that? Why not?

> Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?

We're talking about one account-wide flag `has_exceeded_billing_limits`. Changes are infrequent, and can be pushed into caches. Small overruns while the flag pushes are trivially eaten by AWS.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#102

Post by napsterbr »

terafo wrote: post #45
nixgeek wrote: post #5

It went from 1GB to 100GB, meanwhile Oracle is offering 10TB on their Free Tier. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

They have terrible sign up experience, I'm far from only one who hasn't been able to sign up there because of some cryptic error. When I've tried to google that, there were reports of them requiring using email with full name in it. But changing to that didn't help, using different credit/debit cards didn't help. But prices are quite nice as far as I can tell from the outside.

Same here. My sign-up experience was a nightmare and it took 3 weeks (to create an effing account).

I was at a point where I just said "screw this, I don't care about the free trial, just give me an account where I'm supposed to pay for everything". For some reason you have to go through the free trial in order to get a regular account.

I didn't even try out the platform once I got my account. They managed to drain all my energy in the sign-up process.

I'd rather go bankrupt by AWS/GCP nefarious egress fees than having to deal with Oracle again. Serves me right for giving them a shot.

I second the recommendation to stay as far away from Oracle as you can, even if their OCI pricing seems incredible.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#103

Post by windexh8er »

stillicidious wrote: post #72
ignoramous wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to par…

The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. In my experience it always makes sense to consider the latter. At some point that $595/mo. you're saving will appear on a lead sheet, whether it happens today or (similar to e.g. Google Apps) after 5 years. Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company be…

> The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget.

Using any "free" service is generally not free as you scale. That's the freemium model we live in today.

> Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.

This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to go on at this point. There is no more certainty with AWS, as implied in your statement, than with any other cloud provider. Not all organizations have an end goal in being the scale of AWS. And not all organizations put profit over product with respect to an outdated perspective that said organizations need to grow 40% YoY for all of eternity to be successful. It's now, more than ever, very clear that AWS profit margins on data transfer are egregious and they spin the backpedal as "Oh - look at us dropping prices, for you, our esteemed customer!". This is the real marketing slight of hand here, not the other way around.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#104

Post by rstupek »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #57

As an AWS user I'm a bit disappointed with this. I was hoping their answer would be to cut or eliminated some prices across the board vs just increasing the free tier. I find most apps are pretty binary. Either they are high bandwidth (like video and backups) or not. If you use 1TB there is a good chance you will use 2TB. This will certainly make it less likely for the low bandwidth users to get a surprise bill but i…

With reinvent coming up next week, we may not have heard the last of their response to lowering egress fees

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#105

Post by luhn »

orf wrote: post #87
swiftcoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still incur charges before the budget action kicks in and terminates your resources.

Ok so how would this work in any other way? Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? No, of course not. Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be delayed. But then you run into an issue: what if you end up costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in. Should you not pay that? Why not?

> Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?

Budget actions work by applying an Deny All to IAM, which has essentially exactly that.

The problem is not the shutting down, it's the detection. AWS billing has a resolution measured in hours, which has limited usefulness on a platform where you can rack up thousands of dollars in charges in just a few minutes.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#106

Post by throwaway2016a »

discodave wrote: post #99
throwaway2016a wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never operated at Amazons scale so I don't know the wholesale costs involved but at least one estimate puts AWS margins at bandwidth at 99% [1]. And I'm guessing ingress is a fixed cost where they are running nowhere near capacity and that is why it is free. That and they want your data on AWS so they can charge you for storage and when you download it. I realize business need to make a profit but I don't think…

An underestimated chunk of AWSs costs is people. They employ >50k people, and likely have a salary bill of several billion dollars, a significant portion of revenue. 50,000 x 250k = 12.5B Also, they do cross-subsidize, because many AWS services are either hardly used (CodePipeline) or free (CloudFormation) and the cost to run those services is non-negligible.

Very good point RE people. Running AWS is expensive, I'm sure, but to be clear, I'm not advocating for bandwidth to be free. Just that $0.08 per GB is not competitive.

Also, since CloudFormation is a feature that facilitates creating more resources that you do pay for I'm not sure that is a great example. That is more like saying that the other services subsidize the Web Console. CloudFormation is not a product in-and-of itself, it is more a shared feature that spans product lines.

Code Pipeline is an interesting one in that if it is true it's not widely used and costs more money than it makes, that's a no brainer: shut it down. But there has got to be more to that story why they haven't.

But in any case, with code pipeline there is a clear value chain that ends at ECR/EC2/Lambda/etc. My guess -- and it is just a guess -- would be that someone feels pipeline produces more revenue for EC2 (or similar) and that covers the cost. Or, simply, they have a path for it to be profitable.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#107

Post by nijave »

Spivak wrote: post #64
Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

I don't think AWS's billing system is robust enough for that. In pure AWS fashion you have to create a billing alarm, which pushed an event to SNS which triggers a lambda to shut down your stuff but it is possible. The catch is that billing metrics are estimates and alarms might be delayed.

Yup, seems like they have a lot "eventually consistent" batch processing going on. Certain things like CloudTrail have 4-6 hour lags in billing (unless it's improved in the last year)

It'd be a huge engineering effort to make something instantaneous--I think the closest thing they have to such a system is whatever they use for rate limiting or IAM.

I'm guessing there's a pretty high overhead to trying to do realtime instead of batching

AWS oopsies suck but I think their billing system is pretty robust compared to lots of usage based billing systems (like, say, utilities)

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#108

Post by nijave »

busymom0 wrote: post #92
shepherdjerred wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle

Can someone educate me on why Oracle is bad? I don’t have much experience with dealing with them as a company. Only used their database before.

They tend to have aggressive sales, high degree of lock in, and high license costs.

You basically get stuck paying lots for Oracle software and that doesn't directly equate to value the software provides

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#109

Post by staticassertion »

Someone1234 wrote: post #76
nostrebored wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for what you use, the peak of shady business practices!

That's really disingenuous. The complaint here is that Amazon offers a free tier supposedly for learning the platform, but it is a giant footgun that shoots a ton of people in the foot. People are reasonably asking for hard limits to protect them from this highly foreseeable situation wherein a complicated cloud offering can go on a spending runaway. It is literally as easy as following a beginner tutorial and select…

"Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary footgun as well, and one that could impact larger customers.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're using AWS you're taking on some responsibility to make sure you're not blowing up your bill. AFAIK you are automatically enrolled in emails that will tell you when you're about to exit a free tier limit, so it's not like they won't warn you.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#110

Post by nijave »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

Woah woah woah we're bashing AWS here :)

Imo hard spend limit is a pretty complicated thing to implement and billing has historically been very batch based

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