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Cloud Egress Costs

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Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#251

Post by vidarh »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #7

The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…

Yeah, I've built several setups where total cost of ownership was lower than egress cost alone would have been on AWS. Both w/physical hardware in colos and with rented managed servers at providers like OVH and Hetzner.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#252

Post by deskamess »

rezonant wrote: post #171
deskamess wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'appropriate transcoding'?

Video transcoding: Taking the raw uploaded video and re-encoding it so it is appropriate for being sent to video players over the web. Typically this takes the form of creating "renditions" of the source video at lower resolutions, but you'll have to decode and re-encode the video to do that, hence transcoding. Pretty much all video you watch online is delivered using an adaptive bitrate technology like HLS or DASH.…

Thanks. Our use case is simpler so we only have one variant that gets uploaded and served. However we do not have any associated .m3u8 files, so that was my concern.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#253

Post by vidarh »

whizzter wrote: post #233
DeathArrow wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

As someone working at a dev shop/full-service-agency mostly using cloud(Azure) and having also managed server on my own in the past it's an easy breakdown. 1: We have a dozen or so regular clients and being in a relatively high salary cost country, while our cloud bill isn't insignificant it's still far less than one full time employee, even less so than having 24/7 on-call handled (we have large enough 24/7 critical…

If you don't still have that on call ops engineer, you're tricking yourself into thinking you have cover you simply don't. The low level hardware and networking issues that a cloud provider would abstract from you in a well set up system are a rounding error of the set of ops issues.

I used to provide services like that, on call, and the number of ops related interventions for my cloud customers were consistently higher than for those on colo setups.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#254

Post by vidarh »

lumost wrote: post #191
dijit wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing we should all have a subtle understanding of: if you are a company selling infrastructure tooling as a service (Vercel, for example). You should probably try to avoid hyperscalers. The adage is that you should outsource the things that are not your core competence. However if your product is infrastructure for developers then outsourcing that is going to be painful. You are forced to pass down costs from yo…

Practically, this means that if you are an infrastructure tolling company - then you must reinvent all pieces of the cloud supply chain before building your product. That’s a very expensive proposition. While the paper cost of a few racks in a colo is low - the people time to get where you want to be is high. If you mess up in this evolution - there is a risk that others outcompete you on something that isn’t your co…

The people time of setup in a colo or managed provider is trivial if you hire someone who actually know what they're doing, and usually lower than a cloud setup. It's stupidly easy to mess up a cloud setup in ways that are hard with a rack.

I find this is mostly an issue with a lot of shops simply having nobody with actual ops experience.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#255

Post by shell_game »

njitbew wrote: post #65

Oracle Cloud only charges a fraction of want Google, Microsoft, and Amazon charge. Any idea how Oracle is able to keep the cost so low? Or are the others just inflating the price so customers don’t move to the competitor? In that case Oracle deserves a shout out for not applying these vendor lock-in practices.

Oracle has other lock in practices lol… they don’t need to jack up egress fees.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#256

Post by rezonant »

ksarw wrote: post #202
0x6c6f6c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumedly, implementing the logic yourself for transcoding source content into various encodings on demand. If you're storing 1080p h265 MP4s in R2 and the client can only support 480p h264 it'll request that but you need to "appropriately transcode" for them. The alternative is a service that does this for you, like Cloudflare Stream. Upload source video, service handles transcoding and integrates easily with standa…

I don't think Cloudflare's free egress covers video storage and retrieval https://community.cloudflare.com/t/can-we-serve-video-with-r... Please correct me if I am mistaken; also R2 is not a CDN, and more like s3 in terms of delivering from the edge No issue with your comment specifically, just wondering if you know. currently using s3+cloudfront for mp4 storage+delivery, and would like to move to something better if…

> Please correct me if I am mistaken; also R2 is not a CDN, and more like s3 in terms of delivering from the edge

Yes, it uses Cloudflare's edge network and caching infrastructure when you use a custom domain (really the only option because usage of the default domain is very limited). So yes, it's a CDN :-)

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/cdn-support-for-r2/514573

> currently using s3+cloudfront for mp4 storage+delivery, and would like to move to something better if possible.

What I have found is that (A) the egress costs are extreme compared to R2 (remember, R2 does charge per read/write though) but (B) storage is cheaper on S3. You should do a study on your storage and egress, but unless you are storing way more than your egress TB, it's probably a good deal.

Cloudflare also has a mechanism for transparently pulling content from an upstream S3 compatible store into R2. I think it's called Super Slurper iirc

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#257

Post by Beefin »

zerr198 wrote: post #85

We moved to AWS a few years ago, after self-hosting our own storage for years. What a nightmare.. The egress fees were killing us, so we had to find something else. Being weary of these large tech companies, and being that these days we're more privacy conscious as well. We found a new startup that outsources storage nodes to individuals / businesses. You have to install what they call a "relayer" on prem. The relaye…

is AWS Outpost not an option?

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#258

Post by growse »

morningsam wrote: post #246
zer00eyz wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There have been other instances in which exit fees, which is what this amounts to, were considered anticompetitive, e.g. [1] (although this was settled so there is no ruling). Google itself has started to waive egress costs for GCP customers leaving the platform last month, which, according to some sources, is simply a direct consequence of new EU legislation (Data Act) [2], but according to others is in anticipation…

I'm a little ignorant of the upcoming regs, but are they aiming to basically say "if a customer wants to leave a service, then the provider must provide them with all their data for free"?

I've not thought about the unintended consequences of this, but it feels like a reasonable regulation to have.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#259

Post by rfoo »

amluto wrote: post #41
PreInternet01 wrote: post #7

The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…

> 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…

While I agree with what you said in general, Snowflake is a poor example. Data warehouses like Snowflake really can use the Tbps+ aggregated bandwidth between S3 and EC2 in the same region. There is no way for this to work over the Internet.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#260

Post by PuffinBlue »

foofie wrote: post #196
8organicbits wrote: post #194

One trick to watch out for: a cloud provider offering inexpensive egress can still make high-egress expensive by controlling the network speed of their instances. Several vendors require you to scale your whole instance if you saturate any of the components (like needing to upgrade from the 2 CPU to the 4 CPU instance to increase the network throughput, even though you don't need more CPU). On paper egress looks chea…

> Several vendors require you to scale your whole instance if you saturate any of the components (...) Interesting. Which cloud providers do you have in mind?

The GP might be referring to how most of the non-hyperscalers like Linode or DigitalOcean or Vultr tie total monthly egress to instance size. IIRC they do allow overage charges at $x per GB but it quickly becomes more expensive to do it that way.
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