101–110 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is so wrong it's not funny. Call? Isn't our use of computers predicated on the notion that we don't want to do manual labor?
My main gig revolves around bill auditing. You'd be amazed at the number of Fortune 500's that are supposedly driven by technology that have very manual processes around billing.
I think thought that it's a failure of technologists to properly address the challenges of billing.
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
Which is why you should be relying heavily on a caching layer outside of AWS. You're not serving objects directly from S3, are you? A big no-no if you care about latency at all (S3 from time to time will take upwards of ~500ms to serve HTTP GET requests). EDIT: Example: We use Akamai as our caching layer, as their bandwidth costs are much less than Cloudfront (their analytics are better as well, and they don't charge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the scale large providers operate at, they don't pay per GB, they pay at the 95th percentile for Gb/10Gb links. It's the same way you pay a fixed hourly rate (in most cases) for your retail electricity, and your provider is paying wholesale spot market rates that can fluctuate in ~5 minute windows. TL;DR You're paying for consistency and abstraction away from the underlying IP transport costs.
Transit costs less than $1/Mbps/month, which works out to only a few cents/GB. It still looks like pretty high markup.
My understanding is that S3 is near indestructible from a serving perspective, but it may be computationally expensive for AWS to scale up/scale down for bursty/peaking outbound traffic serving needs.
Another possibility is that Amazon doesn't charge for inbound, but charges a premium for outbound to balance their traffic ratios so they can peer with providers vs having to buy their transit. The free inbound traffic to S3 offsets their outbound traffic not only from AWS, but their consumer-facing web properties.
As always, just my assumptions/observations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated. This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.
That is so wrong it's not funny. Call? Isn't our use of computers predicated on the notion that we don't want to do manual labor?
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.
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!)?…
If you have opted in for the "don't let me spend more than $x," then yes.
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…
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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.
RRS: 2+3+6+8+9+18+19+22+27+34+42+48+7=~245 TB/months=~
Normal: 7+9+13+19+24+46+56+65+76+95+123+153+174+25=~885 TB/months
Difference:
$0.085-$0.0300=$0.055
$0.068-$0.0240=$0.044
End:
0.055 * 885 * 1024=$49,843 0.044 * 245 * 1024=$11,039 $49,843+$11,039=~$60k saved which is 20% of what they were short, if they had started with April 1st's pricing.
If you can reduce the AWS $400k by 40% due to the reduced pricing for EC2, you'd still fall short.
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I had the same thought. Their last Amazon bill was $35k. I don't think saving $10-20k/month would have made a significant difference. They had many freemium users, and were not adding customers at a sufficiently high growth rate over the life of the company. They were trying to raise $5m.
The importance of this depends on unit economics. For businesses with historically tight margins (e.g. retail), small swings in input prices (labor, cost of goods) can make or break profitability. Whereas software, if you're doing it right, should have much higher margins. Sidenote: I'd be very curious to know what the "typical SaaS business" has as its gross margin, factoring in all sales against "cost of goods": se…
http://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-typical-gross-margin...
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/10/02/running-a-saa...
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
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.
If I am wrong about this (and I hope I am), where can I find more information about that?
Thanks!
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.
While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated. This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.