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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

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Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#241

Post by api »

akira2501 wrote: post #190
martinald wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine.

Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streaming, game servers, TURN servers, video conferencing relays, etc.

I find it hard to believe that AWS or GCP are getting core Internet bandwidth on worse terms than much smaller companies like Vultr, Hivelocity, Datapacket, or OVH.

I call BS.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#243

Post by cdchn »

JoshuaRogers wrote: post #106
dijit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd be harder pressed finding ones that do (before a reasonable limit). tilaa.com vultr.com hetzner.com linode.com

While they might not charge you directly as a line item, you still get charged: Linode in the above list is what I use. I get a fixed cap of bandwidth each month. Anything beyond that is charged. So, you don't get charged IF you stay below the initial cap.

Exactly this. They're all charging for bandwidth.

If anything you could say that AWS is the closest to actually having unlimited bandwidth (or at least, half-parity there) since they don't charge you for incoming data, where other VPS charge you for data both ways.

Really which has more or less expensive bandwidth comes down to the shape of your data usage.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#244

Post by BackBlast »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #204
ipaddr wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud doesn't make sense for small business. A vps would. If you are spending less than 100,000 you probably don't need it for your 10,000 million or less daily visitors

If you're spending less than 100,000, you almost certainly aren't spending enough to pay salary + benefits for a sysadmin.

Why does everyone always jump to this fiction?

You probably aren't paying a "cloud engineer" just to fiddle with cloud config full time with Internet sites ran on basement and closet servers for years, actual server rooms for larger stuff. The jokes were tripping over power cords and backhoes digging up internet lines were the causes of most outages. It's never been easier to run on-prem than today. It cost a fraction of even budget VPS providers like Hetzner.

For certain classes of applications, it's awesome. It's not everyone's cup of tea I'll grant. But if you are inclined to play with hardware or have someone in the org who does, and an extra 2-4 hours of downtime a year isn't that big of a deal (depending on general utility and network available at your chosen site). You can save tons of money.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#245

Post by nodeshift »

akira2501 wrote: post #186
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.

Cost analysis should of course play the foundation of everything you build, regardless if it's SaaS tooling or infrastructure. But surely it's easier to do a cost assessment and optimization exercise on something that is fundamentally more affordable than AWS and doesn't have as high of margin costs? That's why we have built a platform that creates all the value at a low cost.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#246

Post by BackBlast »

overstay8930 wrote: post #150
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a fair comparison though? AWS is a very weird argument to make because you could say that AWS is kind of “on premise” for Amazons purposes. Internally Amazon.com does not pay retail pricing or have the same level of support as third party end users. A better example would be looking at Jet.com/Walmart and asking if it runs on AWS.

Nobody who is big is paying retail prices, that's why saying "on premise is cheaper" is total copium. As soon as you start factoring in discounts (i.e. bandwidth is nearly free at some point), the math of being on premise completely falls apart to the point you are paying more for licensing and support for the hardware than you are the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure in the cloud. It's just that bad to do it…

I ran the numbers the other day. For just compute with my particular load, my numbers say AWS costs 73928x more for lambda over my on-prem. Like for like is 1250x more. This is presuming the savings levels for being a big spender that I've heard about.

That's a lot of room to work with for some inconvenience.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#247

Post by akira2501 »

api wrote: post #241
akira2501 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reall…

If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine. Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streami…

The other companies have significantly different SLAs and drop packets far more readily. They also charge for bandwidth, in my experience, you get your 1TB/mo with your $5 VPS sure, but once you go over, you're facing per/GB charges that are very close to AWS default egress price.

They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "cheap bandwidth" you have to be prepared to run 100s of VMs per provider, and have to consider provisioning VMs you don't need just to get access to another $5 TB of transfer, or you're just going to end up paying the per GB fee anyways.

The terms aren't worse, but the service and their guarantees are different. Again, if you ask AWS for a bandwidth deal, they'll cut you one within a few minutes that will more than halve the price of your transfer if you pay up front. Which is AWSs way of saying, "if you make your usage predictable, we can make it way cheaper."

Why? Because they have fixed _capacity_ on their links. The costs manage that _capacity_.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#248

Post by icedchai »

BackBlast wrote: post #244
Turing_Machine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're spending less than 100,000, you almost certainly aren't spending enough to pay salary + benefits for a sysadmin.

Why does everyone always jump to this fiction? You probably aren't paying a "cloud engineer" just to fiddle with cloud config full time with Internet sites ran on basement and closet servers for years, actual server rooms for larger stuff. The jokes were tripping over power cords and backhoes digging up internet lines were the causes of most outages. It's never been easier to run on-prem than today. It cost a fractio…

Exactly this. I've set up several VPSes for clients. They go for years without any maintenance because they don't want to pay for it. (They only bother when something is absolutely critical... like the OS is EOL and no more security upgrades.)

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#249

Post by icedchai »

chongli wrote: post #138
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…

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…

If you have a large enough on-prem infrastructure where you are using automation and not manually configuring everything, the skillsets will have a lot of overlap.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#250

Post by api »

akira2501 wrote: post #247
api wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine. Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streami…

The other companies have significantly different SLAs and drop packets far more readily. They also charge for bandwidth, in my experience, you get your 1TB/mo with your $5 VPS sure, but once you go over, you're facing per/GB charges that are very close to AWS default egress price. They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "ch…

Digital Ocean and Vultr are a fraction of AWS pricing. Vultr is $0.01/gb. Bare metal providers are often cheaper still, selling by size of pipe rather than bytes transferred.

In my experience GCP and AWS are pretty unwilling to budge on bandwidth pricing unless you are very large and making a long commitment. If you are not spending six figures a month forget about it.

You may be right about SLA but I run large volume services out of bare metal providers and do not experience meaningful packet loss or down time in practice. Bandwidth costs are easily hundreds of times less than AWS or GCP.

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