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Cloud Egress Costs

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Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#61

Post by Eridrus »

amluto wrote: post #60
Eridrus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowflake's margins are like 90%+ on top of the compute they sell, and they pass on all these costs including egress directly to customers.

Their list price for storage capacity is only on the order of 2x what S3 charges, and Snowflake and S3 likely both offer discounts. Comparing compute costs is harder. If I were running a service like Snowflake, I would certainly appreciate the effortless scaling that the major clouds offer. But I also know what I pay for actual servers and roughly what I would pay in a major cloud, and I much prefer the former.

Yeah, storage is much more competitive, but there have been leaks on what hardware they run on, their margins are incredible, which makes sense since they are selling software, not hardware!

Anyway, there is an explicit egress charge: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-...

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#62

Post by dalyons »

amluto wrote: post #60
Eridrus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowflake's margins are like 90%+ on top of the compute they sell, and they pass on all these costs including egress directly to customers.

Their list price for storage capacity is only on the order of 2x what S3 charges, and Snowflake and S3 likely both offer discounts. Comparing compute costs is harder. If I were running a service like Snowflake, I would certainly appreciate the effortless scaling that the major clouds offer. But I also know what I pay for actual servers and roughly what I would pay in a major cloud, and I much prefer the former.

tbf, snowflakes whole thing & what makes them "next gen" vs a traditional datawarehouse is that you dont may much for data at rest. You pay as little as possible for the "warehousing" part, and pay mostly/only for compute/querying.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#63

Post by Fripplebubby »

_cenw wrote: post #24
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…

It really depends on the quality of the peering you expect. It doesn't matter, until it does. Consumer ISPs sometimes do their utmost to not peer with open exchanges, and the entire thing gets even more complex when you go to places where bandwidth is more expensive (i.e. Oceania). There's a reason the favorite chart to exemplify value Cloudflare reps like to show is Argo Smart Routing, and why it costs about $100 pe…

I agree, and I would also put forward that most people don't understand what peering is or how it works. When people (usually developers who are not network engineers and have not worked at that level of the stack) talk about "egress", they mean delivering bits from your network (cloud or otherwise) to any other network on the internet. How can you put just one price on delivering a bit either to a host within the same datacenter or one on the opposite side of the planet? Physics still mean that one is more expensive than the other.

The existence of the world wide web has tricked us into thinking that sending traffic anywhere is/should be the same, but of course it is not. So while the price you (a cloud customer) pay for egress pricing is (often) indiscriminate on where that traffic is going, using common sense, we can understand that some traffic is more expensive than others, and the price we pay is a blended price with that aspect "baked in" or "priced in".

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#64

Post by paulgb »

thepaulmcbride wrote: post #27

Offt, not a good look for Railway, Render or Vercel!

I’m a fan of all three, but my mindset is that I’m not just paying for raw infrastructure, I’m paying for the engineering work I don’t have to do when I use them.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#65

Post by njitbew »

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.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#66

Post by Scubabear68 »

The article says “ Cloud providers charge for egress because it costs them money to send data out of their network. They have to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth required to send data to users”.

The charge is not based on cost in the case of the big names. They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free.

Hence the high costs to deter this behavior.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#67

Post by andersa »

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.

The large providers are overcharging between 10 and 100x on egress. Cloudflare has a blog on it somewhere.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#68

Post by xyst »

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…

just 1 engineer? lol. Let's hope it's not business critical for the servers to be up and running at all times if you only need 1 engineer.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#69

Post by api »

Eridrus wrote: post #47
amluto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Snowflake's margins are like 90%+ on top of the compute they sell, and they pass on all these costs including egress directly to customers.

“Let’s get rid of IT and stop using on prem software. Outsource it all to the cloud and SaaS. We’ll save so much money!” … said the entire world pretty much …

This is hilarious. Now that nobody makes on prem software anymore and nobody knows how to do IT, it’s time to turn the screws. The prices are only going up. You can’t move your data because it’s all locked into proprietary silos and only readable by one app running in one place.

I told you so. So did loads of others. Oh well.

Re: Cloud Egress Costs

#70

Post by vlovich123 »

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 prices have insane levels of markup.
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