Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–268 of 268 posts

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#261

Post by kaliszad »

manquer wrote: post #228
cstrahan wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon does not have prove anything to anyone. True. And no one has said that they must prove anything to anyone. Amazon wants to make money, so they probably don't want to terminate the service of people who are acting in good faith. But that's just another way of saying that they probably want to determine with some certainty that someone is not acting in good faith before terminating their service. So it's not t…

In this case they are actually losing money not gaining by allowing this kind of abuse, both because the bandwidth usage costs money and also because of potential lost billing from other services which now is not billed. The Lightsail style billing model works same way shared vs leased lines works, if everyone fully used their max allocation it won't be possible to offer service at that price point. They can offer 2T…

Btw. Hetzner charges 1.19 €/ TB or so if you exceed the 20 TB you get even with the 4.5 €/ month VM. So obviously, AWS is charging disproportionately compared to what it actually costs to deliver that bandwidth/ traffic. These charges are great at preventing a good deal of piracy probably but they also prevent some startups from offering competitive prices or implement a simpler system.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#262

Post by ttul »

lijok wrote: post #109
ttul wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetence. Take my friend’s company for instance. They were frustrated paying $60K/mo to Amazon so their brilliant sysadmin bought $600K of servers and moved them into a cheap colo. Over Christmas, everything died, and the brilliant sysadmin was on holiday. Nobody could get things going again for many days and so their entire SaaS business was failing. They lost a lot of business and trust as a result. The sysadmi…

No key person risk management -> no risk register -> no management. Your friends company will fail regardless of poor sysadmin decision making or not. They need to hire competent management ASAP.

This company is reasonably well run. After going back to AWS, they doubled their revenue and things are going well. They are not incompetent. They did earnestly try to cut their costs and just didn’t see the iceberg.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#263

Post by akira2501 »

martinald wrote: post #258
akira2501 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll sell you the pipe without any guarantee and some include provisions that allow them to instantaneously downgrade your pipe if they decide your servers are a traffic management problem. I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is signific…

Hahahah. I don't even know where to start. If you think a 200x markup from list price on IP transit is a fair reflection of costs from AWS then good luck to you.

Attempting to have a conversation by laughing in someones face as a starter is incredibly obnoxious. If you thought so little of what I had to say why reply at all? What are you hoping to gain by doing this?

I'm not sure you how get a 200x multiplier from per GB prices when the list prices are not per GB of transfer but per GB of capacity. Or are you taking a 1Gb/s price average of $1000/mo and then assuming 100% egress activity on this pipe then multiplying a full month of this 100% usage by the AWS price and dividing the two? I get around 230x there, but this is not a practical comparison, and these types of links are quite different than a standard COLO, so you're in for quite a bit of overhead.

Plus, if you actually used this much bandwidth on AWS, 2.5PB, you could get nearly a 10x break in pricing, bringing the multiple down to 23x. If you didn't try to pre purchase the multiple would be something like 80x because of their built in automatic tiering.

In terms of CloudFront I'm getting a global caching layer. In terms of EC2 I get the VPC. I'm getting quite a bit more than just the bandwidth. In terms of luck, we feel we don't need it because we've actually sat down and calculated the costs (even all the above) for running the type of product we're running, and it's /far cheaper/ to do it entirely inside AWS.

This is all assuming you actually wanted to discuss this on merit.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#264

Post by martinald »

akira2501 wrote: post #263
martinald wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahah. I don't even know where to start. If you think a 200x markup from list price on IP transit is a fair reflection of costs from AWS then good luck to you.

Attempting to have a conversation by laughing in someones face as a starter is incredibly obnoxious. If you thought so little of what I had to say why reply at all? What are you hoping to gain by doing this? I'm not sure you how get a 200x multiplier from per GB prices when the list prices are not per GB of transfer but per GB of capacity. Or are you taking a 1Gb/s price average of $1000/mo and then assuming 100% egr…

You can get _40gbits_ of IP transit for $2000/month now. Not 1gbps for $1000/month. At list price.

I get there is more to it than just transit. But VPC has loads of additional costs for NAT etc. Same with cloudfront.

Cloudflare can basically give everyone virtually unlimited free bandwidth on their S3 equivalent.

It's so preposterous to think that this reflects real cost that I find it funny, I didn't mean to be obnoxious.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#265

Post by 123pie123 »

plywoodtrees wrote: post #260
123pie123 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft what magical things do they have? that every single reasonably sized enterprise doesn't have? it should be extremly easy for a small enterprise to beat any of the main clouds* - they make crap ton of profit from you *making an assumption that your needs are reasonably static and not MASSIVELY busting…

The "magical" thing they have is thousands and thousands of people thinking about how to improve the performance/efficiency/availability of their datacenters. And yes, they pay the costs of those people and take a good profit margin, and yes there are in some ways diminishing returns to go from 3 nines to 6. But most enterprises can't match that depth of concentrated expertise, certainly not most small enterprises.

just to confirm I when i say small(ish) enterprise - i'm referring to company with around 500+ people and a IT dept of over 20+ people

seriously??!? you think you need thousands of people to to improve your effeciency and performance I would strongly suggest employing a few good infrastructure engineers/ architects who know what they're talking about - there really is no secret sauce!! just lots of kool aid on cloud

the whole cloud thing only looks wonderful and magical if your inexperienced.

re: the whole up time x9 thing is fairly useless in the real world, since the architecture of the application is really the king here!! christ on a stick i got an application running 100% for 3+ years on NT 4 because of good design (the clue is active - active - active)

also to add... availibilty zones are a very very poor mans DR

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#266

Post by overstay8930 »

holoduke wrote: post #239
overstay8930 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing semantics, you are on massive copium if you think that automation is useful to anyone. Go ahead and set up cryptographic attestation (or just try and interface with a TPM ffs) for your apps on Hetzner to decrypt customer data and see how impossible it is.

Sorry but what kind of wubble wobble talk is this. Hardly anyone needs the stuff you refer to.

Everyone needs it, you've just lied to yourself enough that you can talk yourself out of setting it up for your own apps. It's easy and free if you're in the Cloud, and nearly impossible on-premise to do yourself (i.e. why most VPS providers don't do it).

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#267

Post by overstay8930 »

snug wrote: post #178
overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

AWS and GCP are giving companies like Apple huge discounts so someone could say something like, "Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is" There is too much nuance to say one is better than the other. In some cases using a IaaS is more economical, in other cases it's not. For Apple, the same is also true[0] to say "Even Apple is running their own datacenters because of how economical it is"…

You know everyone gets those discounts right? Like that's why the cloud is so much more economical than a datacenter, once you are at scale AWS will give you MASSIVE (I'm talking 30-60% discounts) on compute and other compute-adjacent resources, and I've seen 99% discounts on bandwidth with multi year agreements too.

I think that's where the disconnect is, a lot of people don't actually realize how cheap cloud compute is because they're only seeing the price for like... 20-30 servers and some basic S3 or load balancer usage. There are entire departments at Amazon that run those numbers on a daily basis to make sure AWS is always competitive with building your own datacenter.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#268

Post by manquer »

kaliszad wrote: post #261
manquer wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case they are actually losing money not gaining by allowing this kind of abuse, both because the bandwidth usage costs money and also because of potential lost billing from other services which now is not billed. The Lightsail style billing model works same way shared vs leased lines works, if everyone fully used their max allocation it won't be possible to offer service at that price point. They can offer 2T…

Btw. Hetzner charges 1.19 €/ TB or so if you exceed the 20 TB you get even with the 4.5 €/ month VM. So obviously, AWS is charging disproportionately compared to what it actually costs to deliver that bandwidth/ traffic. These charges are great at preventing a good deal of piracy probably but they also prevent some startups from offering competitive prices or implement a simpler system.

Cost and price are at best correlated. Cost is at best a floor for pricing rarely the signal for it.

Bandwidth cost is very cheap for AWS and other major cloud vendor, even cheaper than likes of OVH, Hetzner buy at, because they also own good chunk of the deep sea cables in addition to DCs.

B/W specifically is charged high as a competitive moat. Every time I consider migration out of say S3, the migration costs always come out prohibitively high because of b/w pricing, so end up staying put.

That is exactly AWS wants, and so b/w is priced costliest in AWS ( even more so than Azure,GCP) because their market share is far ahead and thus have most risk of customer retention. Hetnzer and OVH have less PaaS service moat they have to worry about unlike AWS,Azure GCP , so they instead compete by setting rock bottom prices.

More market share AWS gains, less incentive they have to drop b/w pricing, only pressure to increase.

Post reply on HN