True meaning of Trustless Environment.
Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
31–40 of 268 posts
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#32This is a loophole. Hitting some loss leader at AWS, but if everyone only buys the $1 hotdog and nothing else then the $1 hotdog gets removed.
It’s not a loss leader. Cloud bandwidth pricing is almost pure profit.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#33I'll share my trick :) Lightsail instances can be used to "proxy" data from other AWS resources (eg EC2 instances or S3 buckets). Each Lightsail instance has a certain amount of data transfer included in it's price ($3.5 instance has 1TB, $5 instance has 2TB, $10 instance has 3TB, $20 instance has 4TB, $40 instance has 5TB). The best value (dollar per transferred data) is the $10 instance, which gives you 3TB of traf…
https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ > 51.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing or content delivery network (CDN) Services as described in the technical documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspe…
A had a suspicion that this was against AWS's terms, but I never bothered to look if that was actually the case. Thank you for the heads up!
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#34I don't understand how AWS can keep ripping people off with these absurd data transfer fees, when there is Cloudflare R2 just right over there offering a 100 times better deal.
R2 is still pretty new. I don't know how well it works in practice in terms of performance and availability. And of course durability, which is difficult if not impossible to judge. S3 has a much longer history and track record, so it has the advantage here. And if all your stuff is inside AWS already there are advantages to keeping the data closer. Depending on how the data is used, egress might also not always be such a major cost.
But yes, the moment you actually produce significant amounts of egress traffic it gets absurdly expensive. And I would expect competitors like R2 to gain ground if they can provide reasonably competitive reliability and performance.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#35An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte egress fees. Or just rent cloud servers from one of the many much cheaper VPS hosting services and don’t use all the expensive and complex cloud services all designed to lock you in and drain cash from your at 9 or 12 or 17 cents per gigabyte. Seriously, if you…
> Host it yourself.
If you're actually using the features of cloud - i.e. managed services - then this involves building out an IT department with skills that many companies just don't have. And the cost of that will easily negate or exceed any savings, in many cases.
That's a big reason that the choice of cloud became such a no brainer for companies.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fl…
> A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so. But taking a step away from that, it's really about self-service. When the alternative is logging a ticket for someone to manually misconfigure a VM and then fail to send you the login credentials, then your delivery is s…
> I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so.
Nah, I think it's mostly about the second part of your comment. Everyone hates waiting for months to get a VM or a database or a firewall rule because the infrastructure/DBA teams are stuck ten years in the past and take pride in their artisanal infrastructure building.
So moving to the cloud eliminates a useless layer of time wasting,
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#37This is clever. And as I understand it, one of the tricks WarpStream (https://www.warpstream.com) use to reduce the costs of operating a Kafka cluster.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#38This feels like the tech equivalent of tax avoidance.
If too many people do this - AWS will "just close the loophole".
There's not one AWS - there are probably dozens if not hundreds of AWS - each with their own KPIs. One wants to reduce your spend - but not tell you how to really reduce your spend.
If you make something complex enough (AWS) - it will be impossible for customers to optimize in any one factor - as everything is complected together.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#39I've not seen any evidence that multi-AZ is more resilient. There's no history of an entire AZ going down that doesn't affect the entire region, at least that I can find on the internet within 15 minutes of googling.
Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
#40I'll share my trick :) Lightsail instances can be used to "proxy" data from other AWS resources (eg EC2 instances or S3 buckets). Each Lightsail instance has a certain amount of data transfer included in it's price ($3.5 instance has 1TB, $5 instance has 2TB, $10 instance has 3TB, $20 instance has 4TB, $40 instance has 5TB). The best value (dollar per transferred data) is the $10 instance, which gives you 3TB of traf…
Here's another one:
You can download 1TB of data for free from AWS each month, as Cloudfront has a free tier [1] with 1TB monthly egress included. Point it to S3 or whatever HTTP server you want and voila.
[1] It used to be 50GB per month for the first 12 months. It was changed to 1TB free forever shortly after Cloudflare posted https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress