Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS free tier data transfer expansion

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 175 posts

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#121

Post by notacoward »

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 also have really questionable business ethics. At one startup, I caught them grabbing an unauthorized copy of our customer's source code when we were on-site at the Emerald City to tune it. It wasn't a rogue engineer, either; it was an order at least from their manager and probably higher. At another startup, we pitched a shared-cache idea to take advantage of our hardware. They declined to work with us, then included exactly that feature as a marquee element of their next major release. Then I worked at Red Hat, where anger over their re-badging of RHEL as OEL (among other deeds) ran deep. Over and over again, they've abused partners and customers and even employees. They were the most evil company in the industry before Facebook and others even existed.

See also: Bryan Cantrill's "lawnmower" talk about what happened to Solaris after the Oracle acquisition. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#122

Post by aborsy »

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…

I think I set an alert recently on AWS emailing me if I surpass a limit that I set.

Have you checked out AWS console recently?

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#123

Post by jhack »

Wonder is Backblaze will follow suit. They're part of the bandwidth alliance with Cloudflare and that's great, but if you're using B2 for personal use and want to get data from a private bucket, you're still paying $0.01/GB egress after the first gigabyte.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#124

Post by georgyo »

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…

Google Apps is likely a poor example of your point. All the people who were using the free tier were never forced to paid plans.

I'm still using free tier Google Apps in multiple places, even though they haven't offered new free accounts for about ten years now. They even still let you create new users for free in these legacy GApps.

Interestingly, I would likely migrate off of GApps to a different paid service if Google changed their minds, however I don't think they have a strong incentive to apply pressure here at long as Gmail.com accounts are free.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#126

Post by windexh8er »

slownews45 wrote: post #115
windexh8er wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples. I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and "unlimited" offerings to never believe them. On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period. So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS. Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps API customers etc). AWS d…

> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.

There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words.

Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn.

> So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.

I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other major cloud provider with respect to your statement about public companies who "eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly following the logic.

> Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing.

At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses.

> Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.

I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill conceived at best. Or is your logic just that you can't do this on Cloudflare and that's the root of your argument on why AWS is better? Again, I'm not exactly following your train of thought.

[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-compelling-economics-...

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#127

Post by nostrebored »

jffry wrote: post #120
staticassertion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Nobody is suggesting to make that the default uniformly across all AWS accounts. It would be excellent for anybody intending to use the free tier for its stated purpose (getting to know the AWS platform) who would like to make the _choice_ to shut off their services if they are going to exceed the free tier quotas. That way you are free to experiment, and if you blow up something while learning, you're not then leani…

The free tier is not just for getting to know the AWS platform. I worked with customers hosting the entirety of their early applications on free tier services.

Playing around turns into production.

When your service goes down and you lose $XXXXXX revenue suddenly it's AWS's problem. AWS has taken the approach that keeps the lights on, assuming its customers understand their unit economics.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#128

Post by agiamas »

staticassertion wrote: post #113
bachmeier wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you get in a car accident and don't check your email for a few days? It's extremely hard to understand how a company with their resources is able to send a notification but not able to shut it off if that's what the customer wants.

Well they're two different problems. For AWS to give you an alert a service X needs to send billing data to the billing system. For the billing system to then "turn off" X it needs a number of things. 1. It needs the ability to reach back out to that service. It probably has no idea what it is, all the billing system is likely to receive is something like: {service_name: "X", action: "Put"} ie: Pretty opaque data wit…

Admittedly, all of these are real issues. The thing is that for a company with 1.816 trillion (1816 billion!) market cap as of today, all of these issues are easily solvable. But it's not a matter of "we can't solve it" or even "we don't have the resources to do it, there is some higher priority problem to tackle first".

It's not an engineering problem at all at its heart.

It's a marketing/business problem that someone somewhere is thinking that Amazon can provide a free service to X users, knowing that Y (X, Y positive, Y << X) users will go over their "free tier" usage and pay for all X's costs, maybe even more, making the free tier a profitable business on its own.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#129

Post by ogeiczvm »

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.

My day to day browser is a hardened Firefox (plenty of about:config tweaks, resistfingerprinting, ublock origin, temporary containers etc). For signing up to Oracle Cloud I used a tmpfs based Chromium browser (ie: completely fresh, factory defaults) to avoid issues resulting in my hardened browser. Oracle cloud refused to accept my credit card with a bogus error message saying something about fraud and/or incomplete/incorrect personal details. I searched for the error message and someone on a random website mentioned about having issues with Chrome and to try Firefox. I found that quite unusual as it's usually the other way around but I tried using my day-to-day hardened firefox and instantly worked and account activated within minutes. Go figure.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#130

Post by jffry »

nostrebored wrote: post #127
jffry wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is suggesting to make that the default uniformly across all AWS accounts. It would be excellent for anybody intending to use the free tier for its stated purpose (getting to know the AWS platform) who would like to make the _choice_ to shut off their services if they are going to exceed the free tier quotas. That way you are free to experiment, and if you blow up something while learning, you're not then leani…

The free tier is not just for getting to know the AWS platform. I worked with customers hosting the entirety of their early applications on free tier services. Playing around turns into production. When your service goes down and you lose $XXXXXX revenue suddenly it's AWS's problem. AWS has taken the approach that keeps the lights on, assuming its customers understand their unit economics.

Right there at the top of https://aws.amazon.com/free/ is this:

  AWS Free Tier
  Gain free, hands-on experience with the AWS platform, products, and services
Just because you've worked with customers hosting in the free tier doesn't mean that all free tier users would or should choose to prioritize uptime over cost.
Post reply on HN