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AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

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Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#191

Post by CommieBobDole »

gruez wrote: post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

Because AWS is designed to be like a pitcher plant, shaped like a funnel with inward-facing hairs to make it easy to get in, difficult to get out.

That's pretty much it - in my experience most of AWS' awesome features are designed to lock customers into an environment where Amazon increasingly provides all of the components and services you need to do business.

I would assume the endgame is to create an ecosystem where the vast majority of customers allow their IT function (infrastructure, developing software, engaging third-party SaaS vendors, etc) to atrophy entirely, after which they'll have no choice but to buy what Amazon is selling, at any price, in perpetuity.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#192

Post by milesskorpen »

united893 wrote: post #190

Just curious, how on earth did Kevin and Amir get such incredibly detailed of AWS spending of these accounts. Either they put it together from public resources, or (more worrysome) someone at AWS leaked them line-item based expenses of their top customers. This has got to be incredibly sensitive data for AWS, not something they'd want leaked. If I'm (say) AirBnB or Snap, I'd worry that this data leaks information tha…

The article specifically says its based on internal data.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#193

Post by Pfhreak »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #69
Pfhreak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a little deliberately obtuse -- for example, showing two arrows from an EC2 instance to an EC2 instance that exits the VPC. But I generally don't find this too hard to follow? Traffic within an AZ is generally free, but there are some cases where it's not and they generally make sense to me (leaving the VPC, pushing data from your CDN back upstream, etc.) Then again, I worked for AWS for years, so maybe I'…

>But I generally don't find this too hard to follow? This is just the static picture though. What's harder to predict are the consequences of some innocuous looking code change.

Sure, but surely teams have monitoring on their usage, right? With automated rollbacks or at least one click manual rollbacks?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#194

Post by zmmmmm »

ben509 wrote: post #173
pm90 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but then why does AWS charge for inter-az traffic? That seems like an "egress but not really" kinda thing. If AWS/GCP stopped charging for this, customers would be incentivized to build HA systems and distribute their workloads across AZ's, which are a win for both customers and you (since capacity is now spread instead of stuck in a zone).

The doctrine for HA is that each AZ should be fully independent, and if you do that, your inter-AZ traffic is relatively minimal. And I think the charges for inter-AZ transfer are to incentivize customers to do that. Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system...

> so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system

This is one of those gotcha's that company's hit. They see the public pricing page and think "wow that is much cheaper than one my internal IT department charges for X", and then when they go to actually implement they find that "best practice" says they basically have to more than double or even triple the cost to get a reliable system (more because not only do you have to duplicate all the infrastructure into a second AZ, you are getting charged for the replication traffic between them).

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#195

Post by NikolaeVarius »

bobbonew wrote: post #114
tyho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is always https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Keeping track of all the different offerings AWS has is a full time job.

Someone does it for you https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

I am completely unaffiliated with this site, I just enjoy it

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#196

Post by bam_boo »

qes wrote: post #178
throwaway_bad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works. Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge: > There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrang…

According to Cloudflare, they do not have any bandwidth pricing arrangement with Microsoft for Azure users. They also do charge for Enterprise plans, but instead of transparent pricing I got high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate so that as we grow past our current contract, we're forced to upgrade at any point with pricing based solely on our original negotiation.…

> high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate

If you have the ability to shift your entire enterprise CDN away from them, why not first try renegotiating?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#197

Post by DoctorOetker »

does anyone know of a cheap service to order large amounts of data by mail on physical media?

I am often interested in some dataset for which I can afford the storage in the form of a hard drive but not in the form of a download through my home connection.

If a service existed that simply offered the following:

* customer provides URL (and optionally hash checksum)

* customer pays, and later receives hard disk drive / SSD drive with the download contained

* democratic pricing for the media, or alternatively send your own media (hence at twice media shipping cost...)

* possibly eventually local brick and mortar locations / affiliate locations to drop off and pick up media, in the larger cities

* preferably without account, although an account is not a large impediment

* definitely not coupled to a financial account in a credit fashion, i.e. no qualms with topping up the account, but the service should not be able to withdraw money from my financial account. i.e. debit only (like the typical european bank cards, yes I know credit cards are available in europe as well...)

This would seem like a profitable side business for many programmer types who have high bandwidth connections (or have access to them and are allowed to use the connection for this purpouse).

If someone builds the software stack for a main portal such that affiliates can advertise their physical location, and their pricing for media, for download and for copying to media, then customers could compare and choose on the basis of price.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#199

Post by skj »

merb wrote: post #152
mostlystatic wrote: post #141

I recently started running more Google Cloud VMs in the UK instead of the US. It was costing me £2 a day to run the VMs, but somehow I also paid £12 a day for "GCP Storage egress between NA and EU”. Turns out that by default Google's Docker container registry only stores the Docker images in the US. So each time I launched a VM the Docker image was downloaded from the US. I wrote more about it here: https://www.mattz…

actually there is a eu mirror for the gcp registry eu.gcr.io

It's not a mirror, it's just another place to put your images. If you're eu based then it's definitely better to use eu.gcr.io for everything from the start.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#200

Post by brodouevencode »

brightball wrote: post #55
whoisjuan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer under NDA Do NDAs expire? AFAIK you sign an NDA and you’re bound to respect that forever. Unless the knowledge becomes publicly available.

IANAL I have spoken to a lot of lawyers about contract terms and what I've been told for both NDA and Non-compete style agreements is that they have to have very clearly defined scope to be enforceable. For a non-compete for example, it requires distance and specific field with a clearly defined time period (that's reasonable). For an NDA you have to ensure that the covered information is explicitly labeled (which is…

This is typically true of all contract law. "In perpetuity" is not a thing and if it is, it usually nullifies the contract.
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