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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

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Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#181

Post by acdha »

echelon wrote: post #105
overstay8930 wrote: post #91

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.

On-prem is massively harder if you can’t cut corners on security or reliability. Just things like testing & upgrading firmware, doing real DR testing (I know multiple places which spent lots of time and money doing annual failover tests, but went down hard every time they had a true failure due to something they’d missed), handling things like boot signing or secure logging, etc. all take up multiple FTEs worth of time, or are a checkbox from a platform which handles that for you.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#182

Post by chongli »

hirako2000 wrote: post #144
chongli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper. I think the real story is a bit sordid: office politics. On-prem and cloud are different skillsets. Companies that have been around for a while can end up with both on-prem and cloud experts who end up competing with each other, often on separate teams. Throw in some slick consultants from Amazon who are able to bend t…

I concur. Many VPs bend ears so easily you got to wonder. do they also get invited to some private dinner by those so called slick consultants, who pay the bill in a rush and leaves after forgetting some thick envelope on the table.

It’s a story as old as time itself. IBM has been doing it at least as far back as the 60’s. Fancy consultants who know the tech and also know how to sell and make themselves seem way smarter than the VP’s reports. Do one slick presentation and the VP is asking his team “why didn’t you guys come up with this stuff?”

Next thing you know these multi-million-dollar contracts are signed and the existing teams are just shaking their heads. The smart ones have already put out their resumes and started interviewing elsewhere.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#183

Post by MaxBarraclough »

falserum wrote: post #137
dzikimarian wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Cloud clearly makes sense for: - small business with at least some reliability expectation, and little to none IT expertise - huge workload requirement volatility - having someone else to blame - solution is already working in cloud, with teams being very comfortable there, and perceiving on-prem as “enemy” (analogy: forcing devs to rewrite stuff from haskell to java) - that extra cost is small budget line for you On…

> Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller

Not a good example in my opinion, as Google is also a major provider of cloud services. AWS isn't the only game in town.

I think Disney+ is a more interesting case. A quick google search turns up some articles saying their video streaming is powered by external CDNs. As I understand it, Netflix take the opposite approach and deliver all video data from their own Open Connect CDN, although they use AWS for other workloads (presumably including things like authentication, their recommendation engine, etc).

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#184

Post by 123pie123 »

overstay8930 wrote: post #134
lijok wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No key person risk management -> no risk register -> no management. Your friends company will fail regardless of poor sysadmin decision making or not. They need to hire competent management ASAP.

This is basically the logic of people who say the cloud is too expensive, you have to ignore so many things to make being on premise logical. Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft can, because if you can you are just making huge sacrifices somewhere (usually time, which is why reddit sysadmins complain about how much work they have while…

>Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft

what magical things do they have? that every single reasonably sized enterprise doesn't have? it should be extremly easy for a small enterprise to beat any of the main clouds* - they make crap ton of profit from you

*making an assumption that your needs are reasonably static and not MASSIVELY busting up and down your infrastructure

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#185

Post by nodeshift »

Someone in the thread said that if you're 'at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud.'

We've built https://nodeshift.com/ with the idea that cloud is affordable by default without any additional optimization, you focus on your app with no concerns on costs or anything else.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#186

Post by akira2501 »

nodeshift wrote: post #185

Someone in the thread said that if you're 'at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud.' We've built https://nodeshift.com/ with the idea that cloud is affordable by default without any additional optimization, you focus on your app with no concerns on costs or anything else.

Cost analysis has helped me build great infrastructure on AWS. The costs are communicating to you what is and is not efficient for AWS to do on your behalf, by analyzing the costs and working to reduce them, you also incidentally increase efficiency and in some cases, such as this one, workload durability.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#187

Post by akira2501 »

andersa wrote: post #24

I don't understand how AWS can keep ripping people off with these absurd data transfer fees, when there is Cloudflare R2 just right over there offering a 100 times better deal.

I trust cloudflare far less than AWS. Once my data is in AWS all applications in the same region as the data can use the data without paying anything in transfer costs.

Also, the prices he quotes are label prices, if you are a customer and you pre purchase your bandwidth under an agreement, it gets _significantly_ less expensive.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#188

Post by xbar »

After my account started getting bills this month for pennies for which there was no obvious accounting, I slashed my AWS costs by 100%.

I'm back to managing my own systems. So much cheaper and less chance of nonlinear bills.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#189

Post by mad182 »

simplyinfinity wrote: post #151
glintik wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability differs, right?

I have hetzner vms going on 500+ DAYS without restart. I've been a hetzner customer for about 8 years now. Aws has been down x10 times more than hetzner has. And even when hetzner has issues they are localized to a single DC at worst, most often a single host is down. When aws has issue.. The whole internet has issues. Or their central region goes out, also can affect their other regions. For the small/medium busines…

I have more than 10 servers on Hetzner (some dedicated, some VPS), for 5+ years and the same experience, once one of the dedicated servers had some hardware issues, and an hour later the drives were moved to another box and it was running again. Other than that time, I had downtime only because of my own fault.

Pretty sure over these years AWS has experienced a lot more issues overall.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#190

Post by akira2501 »

martinald wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a loss leader. Cloud bandwidth pricing is almost pure profit.

It's absolutely amazing that so many devs don't realise this. They seem to think that bandwidth should cost a few cents a month, when in reality it is virtually free. Perhaps the 7c/GB charge was reasonable when AWS came out 15 years ago, but networking has got orders of magnitude cheaper and faster in the intervening time period. What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious…

> when in reality it is virtually free

They're not paying for bandwidth, but their connections are not asymmetric, so they need to balance egress and ingress or they will incur fees or dropped traffic.

The pricing is there to maintain this balance. Since they're obviously egress heavy, it makes sense for them to charge for egress, and make ingress free.

People think AWS is using costs to "tax" you, what they're really doing is using to control the shape and size of their traffic.

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