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AWS EC2 General Price Cut

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Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#41

Post by sixdimensional »

scarface74 wrote: post #35
sixdimensional wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one. If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.

IANAL, but I don't believe stating a price has any impact on whether it is anticompetitive or not. If the behavior is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter if other people do it too and state their price as well.

Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios.

If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiting a provider's cloud, to any other network location, on an operational basis, it is actively discouraging exiting the provider's services creating a kind of price barrier that could be cost prohibitive for operational inter-networking.

Operational inter-networking, to me, encourages competition not discourages it.

For example, perhaps I want to use Microsoft Azure's Data Factory to move data from AWS S3 to Redshift. It is not possible as far as I know without egress from AWS to Microsoft's network, and then back again. But surely these clouds are connected with peering relationships making the cost of ingress/egress negligible, so why is this not allowed? That would allow users of the cloud to freely mix and match services from among many clouds.

The world I see today does not seem to encourage such competition.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#42

Post by oefrha »

scarface74 wrote: post #35
sixdimensional wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one. If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.

> you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.

1. That fee is in addition to S3 retrieval costs.

> Q: What does it cost to export my data?

> In addition to the Export job fees detailed on our pricing page, you will also be charged all fees incurred to retrieve your data from Amazon S3.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/

2. $30/TB isn’t even cheap by itself.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#43

Post by gz5 »

sixdimensional wrote: post #20
TechBro8615 wrote: post #7

Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

the best form of competition will be simpler distributed compute, with the ability to more seamlessly process workloads across end user device, edge compute and cloud.

of course, AWS will play there too, but doesn't mean the overall ratios won't tilt towards the edge (although plenty of data "left" for the clouds since overall data will continue to grow).

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#44

Post by unexaminedlife »

MattGaiser wrote: post #39
chrisseaton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you actually buy GPUs now? An advantage of Amazon in the past was that they were actually available there, where they weren’t available to buy in practice.

The crypto scams seem to have died off, so there are probably plenty of used ones on the market. The demand right now has also fallen dramatically even from regular customers. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-motherboard-gr...

oh, yeah. Thanks for reminding me. Disclaimer: My needs are not for crypto currency :)

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#45

Post by sixdimensional »

gz5 wrote: post #43
sixdimensional wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

the best form of competition will be simpler distributed compute, with the ability to more seamlessly process workloads across end user device, edge compute and cloud. of course, AWS will play there too, but doesn't mean the overall ratios won't tilt towards the edge (although plenty of data "left" for the clouds since overall data will continue to grow).

I suppose, like what is happening with Kubernetes.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#46

Post by sdfdsfsdf222 »

sixdimensional wrote: post #41
scarface74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one. If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.

IANAL, but I don't believe stating a price has any impact on whether it is anticompetitive or not. If the behavior is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter if other people do it too and state their price as well. Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios. If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiti…

The Bandwidth Alliance was meant to solve this problem. Azure and GCP have joined, AWS has not. https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#49

Post by pests »

sixdimensional wrote: post #41
scarface74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one. If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.

IANAL, but I don't believe stating a price has any impact on whether it is anticompetitive or not. If the behavior is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter if other people do it too and state their price as well. Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios. If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiti…

One factor could be while of course they are peered it might be paid peering or if they allowed the traffic unmetered it would upset other free peering arrangements due to subsequent asymmetrical transfer rates.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#50

Post by chrisseaton »

reedwolf wrote: post #40
chrisseaton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you actually buy GPUs now? An advantage of Amazon in the past was that they were actually available there, where they weren’t available to buy in practice.

Not sure what you mean. You can buy GPUs anywhere. You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.

> Not sure what you mean.

Over the last decade there was often a major problem in GPU supply. Huge users like Amazon were presumably buying in bulk direct from manufacturers as custom runs so weren’t trying to buy them on the open market like everyone else.

Even other clouds had major problems getting them at some points.

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