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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

111–120 of 268 posts

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#111

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…

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

My small business once spend 50k per month on AWS. We brought that back to 800 dollars for a similar setup at Hetzner. I find this a significant number.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#112

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…

This makes no sense.

So what do I do if I'm at the point where I'm doing sophisticated analysis of on-prem costs? Do I move to the cloud?

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#113

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…

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

Apparently we're doing the impossible for over 12 years now. Who knew?

Some people act like it's some kind of black magic. It's not. We've some customers in our DC and some on AWS for various reasons. AWS isn't less problematic. AWS is about 10x more expensive. Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper.

Only meaningful problem is that on-prem requires some up front cost&time. That can be mitigated by leasing and other means, but indeed can be an issue for small businesses.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

You act like these problems are especially hard. Active-active, five nines, fault tolerance. Hard stuff. But managing on-prem is no harder. This is what we're paid for.

Managing on prem is definitely harder because you are benefiting from the economics of scale of all the management problems that you have to pay yourself, and if you don't have scale then you will be significantly overpaying to get the same type of quality, reliability, or responsiveness.

Most people are not paid to manage infra, they are paid to talk to customers, ship features, fix bugs, and other "core business" items; just like most businesses don't build roads, they pay taxes and utilize them because the cost of doing it themselves for their preferred traffic patterns would be much more than they could justify (for now.)

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#116
> it’s almost as if S3 doesn’t charge you anything for transient storage? This is very unlike AWS, and I’m not sure how to explain this. I suspected that maybe the S3 free tier was hiding away costs, but - again, shockingly - my S3 storage free tier was totally unaffected by the experiment, none of it was consumed (as opposed to the requests free tier, which was 100% consumed).

It’s also possible their billing system can’t detect transient storage usage. Request billing would work differently from how billed storage is tracked. It depends on how billing is implemented but would be my guess. That may change in the future.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#117
post #82

I’ve been deploying 3xAZs in 3xRegions for a while now (years). The backing store being regional s3 buckets (keeping data in the local compliance region) and DDB with replication (opaque indexing and global data) and Lambda or Sfn for compute. So far data transfer hasn’t risen to the level of even tertiary concern (at scale). Perhaps because I don’t have video, docker or “AI” in play?

I’m guessing either you don’t have much data or your infra is already so absurd that, yeah, the transfer costs are irrelevant by comparison.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#119
There are tons of these tricks you can use to cut costs and get resources for free. It's smart, but not reliable. It's the same type of hacking that leads to crypto mining on github actions via OSS repos.

Treat this as an interesting hacking exercise, but do not deploy a solution like this to production (or at least get your account managers blessing first), lest you risk waking up to a terminated AWS account.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#120
post #84

GCP patched a similar loophole [1] in 2023 presumably because some of their customers were abusing it. I'd expect AWS to do the same if this becomes widespread enough. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network

I know of a way to get data out of GCP for free, although I haven't tried it in practice. Wonder if I could find a buyer for this info ;)

I got one for Azure, where it would be nearly free to egress data from Azure to any other cloud provider or the internet.

It works, but i have no use case for it. 100TB egress to the internet costs about 7000$ ... i think, i could do it for 20$-50$.

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