It’s worth noting that, while the big 3 providers do gouge for egress, they typically also have superior network performance and reliability. This is especially true when comparing against budget options like Hetzner.
Cloud Egress Costs
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Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free. This isn't remotely true. The bandwidth alliance exists, and a lot of cloud companies are on the list: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard.…
That’s an impressive word salad, but sorry, no. Egress costs are high strictly to keep you there. This is why egress is dirt cheap on other platforms outside the big 3 cloud providers. This is also why ingress is free.
Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes, and it would be really shitty to charge for DDoS attacks. As far as I can tell, with the exception of some really expensive network environments (e.g. China), nobody has ever charged for ingress.
With an exception to OVH, none of the cheap providers the article has listed have any kind of backbone network. They all rely fully on transit providers. Turns out backbone networks are expensive to operate!
OVH is the sole example of a provider that has a backbone network, and admittedly, it's pretty good. However, nowhere near expansive as the big three, and it falls flat in Asia (which is the hardest to route traffic in). Also OVH has to build datacenters so cheaply that one of them burnt to the ground in recent years...
(Cloudflare has a backbone too, but you have to pay a lot extra to use it. Linode uses the Akamai backbone now but that's a very recent acquisition and it's expected that Akamai will eventually raise costs significantly)
Yes, bandwidth is way too expensive on cloud providers. AWS Lightsail is proof of that. However, I see no reason to believe that this is purely for vendor locking, and nobody has been able to give any evidence of causation between the two beyond "well it's so expensive!!!"
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free. This isn't remotely true. The bandwidth alliance exists, and a lot of cloud companies are on the list: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard.…
> This isn't remotely true. Nothing in your comment rejects or disproves the claim that egress costs are vendor lockdown. Your link to the bandwidth alliance explicitly states that their justification for network costs is unloading infrastructure costs onto end users as data fees. That's their only and best justification. This is clearly a business decision that has no bearing in operational costs. Some cloud provide…
> Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure?
Yes you do pay for the rest of their infrastructure when you rent servers from them...
I'm not saying that the fees aren't extremely overpriced. I know what a gigabit port costs. But saying it's to keep vendor locking is just not true, and nobody has suggested any actual proof of it being true.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases My theory: it forces third party services into the same cloud. Suppose you use AWS and you want to pay a third party SaaS provider for some service involving moderate-to-large amounts of data. Here’s one of many examples: https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/pricing-options/ And look at this remarkable choice: you get to pick AWS…
So an anticompetitive practice.
No.
Everyone knew what the costs were going in.
AWS, cloud was NEVER the cheaper solution. It was never faster, it was never better.
It was easier, and easier came with a price. Like lambs to the slaughter lots of people embraced it. Amazon is a profitable company because of it.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Equinix bare metal bandwidth is pretty crazy expensive too. 5c/GB is less than the 9c that Amazon charges, but still, ouch.
They are an outlier… an extreme one.
Also very few people buy Equinix transit except maybe as a backup.
You buy space in Equinix DCs because they are network neutral and have a high density of ISP POPs, i.e you can light up fibre between your cage and HE, Level3, whatever other transits you want to use + peer with everyone on the local peering fabric super easily.
I consider Equinix transit to be an option only when you really can't be assed to do anything else and you don't intend to hammer the links anyway, otherwise yeah you should be doing all the things above because otherwise you could have rented colo in some shitty backwater DC instead.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty simple. Excessive egress costs = vendor lock in, and yes, forcing third party services into the same cloud (the walled garden), and limiting customer choice. Just another reason so many orgs are getting heartburn from going too deep too fast into the cloud.
Amazing: Cloudflare -- Free for most services OVH Cloud -- Free and unlimited Scaleway -- Free for most services Great: Hetzner 20-60 TB / mo per instance $1.08 Not bad: Linode 1-20 TB / mo per instance $5.00 Oracle Cloud 10 TB / mo $8.50 A bit much: Backblaze 3x the amount of data stored $10.00 Bunny CDN -- $10.00 DigitalOcean 100 GB - 10 TB / mo per instance $10.00 UpCloud 500 GB - 24 TB / mo per instance $10.77 Vu…
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Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free. This isn't remotely true. The bandwidth alliance exists, and a lot of cloud companies are on the list: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard.…
The bandwidth alliance exists to try to cut into AWS’ business. They could always have unilaterally cut rates closer to their cost but that margin was appealing, until they realized that they were never going to catch up with AWS without being cheaper.
This is also a fair take, but not a very compelling reason why bandwidth costs are vendor lock in...
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#218[dead]
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#219Once you buy in a cloud, both you and your data become hostages. And you have to pay ransom monthly.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
So an anticompetitive practice.
No. Everyone knew what the costs were going in. AWS, cloud was NEVER the cheaper solution. It was never faster, it was never better. It was easier, and easier came with a price. Like lambs to the slaughter lots of people embraced it. Amazon is a profitable company because of it.
>It was easier, and easier came with a price.
I kind of doubt it's easier. If you use your own servers you need some stuff to manage them. If you use cloud, you need some cloud engineers to manage your cloud infrastructure. On top of that, if your developers use cloud APIs and frameworks, they have to learn that.