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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

21–30 of 268 posts

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This whole "cloud bad" is just childish. Not childish…. it’s a growing line of thought in the IT community that has bought the cloud sell unquestioningly for 20 years.

But it's the same mindset as "cloud good", which was also a growing line of thought once. Mantras aren't useful; tradeoff analysis is useful.

Mantras are good for orgs that are not mature enough to do actual analysis. A lead developer left recently where I work and while it was likely higher pay that was the biggest decision to move, I suspect the real reason he left is higher ups simply don't listen when he says things like you can't just take full virtual machines on azure, refuse any rewrite/redesign while complaining about high azure spend.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#22
post #5

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…

Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?

https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/#root-server-details (with fair use policy)

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#25
post #10

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…

> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fl…

> A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control

I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so.

But taking a step away from that, it's really about self-service. When the alternative is logging a ticket for someone to manually misconfigure a VM and then fail to send you the login credentials, then your delivery is slow.

When you're chasing revenue, going slow means you're leaving money on the table. When you're a big bureaucratic org, it means your middle managers can't claim to have delivered a whole bunch of shit. Nobody likes being held up, but that's what infrastructure teams historically do.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#26
I'll share my trick :)

Lightsail instances can be used to "proxy" data from other AWS resources (eg EC2 instances or S3 buckets). Each Lightsail instance has a certain amount of data transfer included in it's price ($3.5 instance has 1TB, $5 instance has 2TB, $10 instance has 3TB, $20 instance has 4TB, $40 instance has 5TB). The best value (dollar per transferred data) is the $10 instance, which gives you 3TB of traffic.

Using the data provided by the post:

3TB worth of traffic from an EC2 would cost $276.48 (us-east-1). 3TB worth of traffic from a S3 bucket would cost $69.

Note: one downside of using Lightsail instances is that both ingress and egress traffic counts as "traffic".

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#27

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…

There are also many bare metal and VPS providers that charge radically less for bandwidth or even charge by size of pipe rather than transfer.

Cloud bandwidth pricing is… well the best analogies are very inappropriate for this site.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#28

I'll share my trick :) Lightsail instances can be used to "proxy" data from other AWS resources (eg EC2 instances or S3 buckets). Each Lightsail instance has a certain amount of data transfer included in it's price ($3.5 instance has 1TB, $5 instance has 2TB, $10 instance has 3TB, $20 instance has 4TB, $40 instance has 5TB). The best value (dollar per transferred data) is the $10 instance, which gives you 3TB of traf…

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

> 51.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing or content delivery network (CDN) Services as described in the technical documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your data services or suspend your account.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#30

I'll share my trick :) Lightsail instances can be used to "proxy" data from other AWS resources (eg EC2 instances or S3 buckets). Each Lightsail instance has a certain amount of data transfer included in it's price ($3.5 instance has 1TB, $5 instance has 2TB, $10 instance has 3TB, $20 instance has 4TB, $40 instance has 5TB). The best value (dollar per transferred data) is the $10 instance, which gives you 3TB of traf…

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