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Cloud Egress Costs

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Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#261

Post by acdha »

ehhthing wrote: post #217
acdha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

High egress makes it expense both to leave and to use other services: if you use S3, you’re probably putting processing and analysis in AWS because using someone else’s service would incur hefty egress charges.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#262

Post by amluto »

zer00eyz wrote: post #214
quickthrower2 wrote: post #161

Earlier 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.

> Everyone knew what the costs were going in.

I disagree. The company that put their infrastructure on AWS may well have made an informed choice. But the third party service hosted in AWS doesn’t have a choice, because AWS would punish their mutual customer with egress fees if the service moved out of AWS.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#263

Post by lumost »

vidarh wrote: post #254
lumost wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not so much the setup time for the hardware/networking. This takes some time, but can reasonably be done in a few months even for complex setups.

The problem comes when you then wish to have things like CI/CD, distributed databases etc.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#264

Post by Nevermark »

ehhthing wrote: post #212
Scubabear68 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes

That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress.

You pay for everything. Either directly or indirectly. Indirectly often turns out to be much more expensive.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#265

Post by otmahthe »

redox99 wrote: post #238

I use Oracle Cloud only because of their cheap egress + lots of regions. Hetzner and similar are cheap but don't have enough regions.

What do you think about their services overall ? Do they have serverless computin too ?

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#266

Post by cocothem »

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…

Are you a Google Cloud customer looking to exit Google Cloud? If so, you are eligible for free data transfer when you migrate all of your Google Cloud workloads and data from Google Cloud to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center.

https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#267

Post by Culonavirus »

pier25 wrote: post #116
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.

Egress is an artificial cost. Cloud providers don't pay for it.

Well I'm sure there are some costs, but Google charging you an arm and a leg for traffic when they literally own multiple sea cables going around the world and a bazillion datacenters seems a bit sus...

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#268

Post by kyledrake »

nixgeek wrote: post #180
kyledrake wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. I think a 1gbps ip transit hookup at a data center goes for $200-400 a month right now. And you can push 192TB a month with that. That's not the bulk cost, they buy larger amounts in volume and probably get a huge discount on it. In fact given their size, they might not pay for it at all (peering agreements), so it's just operating costs.

A good chunk of network capital is also amortized into these costs, it isn't just the 20 cents per megabit for IP settlement, it would also be all the routers those ports are connected to, the racks those sit in, the electricity those consume, and the networks beneath that from the hypervisor upwards. Add on the usual and egregious $150-400/mo for a SMF/OS1 crossconnect in many datacenters. Now, I'll grant you, "not…

The important takeaway message I'm trying to deliver is that AWS is comically overpriced regardless of what they are trying to run. Direct connections aside, reasonable cloud competitors with similar networks are charging $0-1000 for transit and the same amount would cost $8500 on AWS. Cloudflare in particular has demonstrated that you can run these systems so efficiently that they can charge nothing for egress and still make a healthy profit selling related cloud services.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#269

Post by close04 »

growse wrote: post #258
morningsam wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ingress and egress should be treated the same. Without any anti-competitive reasoning in mind a provider can’t claim that egress in particular should be more expensive than ingress. Even more so when ingress is many times completely free.

The asymmetry is obviously meant to trap customers, which is anti-competitive.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#270

Post by vidarh »

lumost wrote: post #263
vidarh wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not so much the setup time for the hardware/networking. This takes some time, but can reasonably be done in a few months even for complex setups. The problem comes when you then wish to have things like CI/CD, distributed databases etc.

The vast majority of companies never reach a scale where wiring up the infra needs to take more than days.

And CI/CD and distributed databases are equally not an issue of you actually have someone experienced do it.

Done this many times.

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