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Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

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Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#81
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invisible hand works in perfect markets which never exist in reality. It is used as a smokescreen by the people with insane amounts of money who can bend the rules to their will, to convince the rest of the people how the economy works. Like most of economics

Regulations work with perfect governments that are all knowing, all powerful and only interested in the good of the people. It is used as a smokescreen by the governments who can (literally) bend the rules to their will, to convince the rest of the people how the economy works. I would say this is ever further from reality than perfect markets. So we probably need both.

The reality of the US Government is that regulations only happen when sufficiently monied interests are diametrically opposed and then some sort of logic sometimes comes out of it.

At least the US model often feels the need to produce something that appears sensible on the surface, although usually with gotchas in subsection 14 part C paragraph 2.

The EPA, NHTSA, FAA, FCC, SEC, etc go through periods of wax and wane with being undermined, then publicly embarrassed, then reconstructed with legitimate people, then undermined, etc. But they exist and ... eventually ... impose regulation.

I have never heard anyone say credibly as a politician to get rid of them, and goddamn are there a lot of corporate forces that want them gone, so as institutions these regulatory agencies have proven themselves.

The FDA however ... I'm pretty down on.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#82

AFAIK this is pretty much the moat collapsing on big cloud. That said you still have to contact them for it so not truly free movement. Once it becomes truly free to move data out things will get interesting. The stock market didn’t really seem to care that much which was surprising.

I think AWS doesn't truly care. They've probably internally planned for the day when egress cost billing would be chipped away and have been planning. It is a total cash cow and huge boast on margins for them, but they've been taking that money over the years and diversifying into managed services.

The managed services are expensive, but boy do they work well. Over the last couple years been running +100 each of managed elastic searches, RDS, and firehouse with minimal to no issues.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#83
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you manage to delete everything and make the billing to be zero dollars, then there's no need to close the account... In many cases, this is way harder than it sounds.

Beginner here, but shouldn't `terraform destroy` make this very easy? Assuming you deploy everything with IaC.

Some things are impossible to destroy immediately. KMS keys take 60 days to remove.

You can also start the close account process which takes 60 days and just pay the fees for anything not torn down and then it all gets nuked at the end of that period.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#84

If AWS cut most of the egress fees, not only by asking to their support, that would be the greatest thing ever happening in the cloud computing space. A lot of multi-cloud architectures are unlikely to be designed because the egress fees are killing them. Imagine if we could host some of the infra in AWS, using S3, but keeping some machines on Hetzner, while calling other APIs hosted in azure… one day it will happen…

You dont need to wait for that one day. Right now I’m using cloud servers from hetzner and store data in Backblaze S3 and train models on Lambda or even vast.ai.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#85
post #40
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to myself: Of course these price reductions why they suddenly charge for IPv4 addresses. To my understanding AWS does not suffer from scarcity, they have huge pools. At least for customers using a lot of egress the charging per address is probably cheaper. For small businesses with relatively little businesses but not so slim deployments with addresses hanging around on many little used or even forgotten res…

The market price for IPv4 addresses has peaked: https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/are-we-past-peak-ipv4 Amazon’s move seems to be motivated by pure greed and quasi-monopoly complacency.

Maybe, but I don't think so. The market is simply going through a cycle.

With such a high price per IP there are a lot of organizations finally putting in the effort of cleaning up their space and selling off blocks. I know a company that was doing consolidated and clean up for an aggregation of freeing 200k worth of space. They were looking at adding $15-35M to their pockets.

IPv6 support is still not where it needs to be. Look at the clouds. There are many services that still are only IPv4 or partial ipv6 support. Just check back in 1-3 years and the price will have recovered.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#86

It gets to the meat and potatoes at the end. They were forced to do it, so they put a positive spin on it as if they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart. Still a positive, but man, that marketing messaging. I give props to the team who wrote that.

That, friends, is a "tell".

It shows they know they are raking people over the coals with intentional, preconceived illegal anticompetitive behavior written into their documentation.

Right from the playbook, they have a sweet marketing wrapup for when they have to walk back their preconceived illegal behavior to the minimum directed border.

Tech corps especially now do this as standard operating procedure (I mean Uber had entire divisions and armies of lawyers to bypass/obfuscate/delay imposition of local cab and labor laws). It's why you can't trust them with AI, personal information, AI, customer service, AI, following laws, AI, or anything.

I know Google in the heydey of the aughts wasn't as "good" as they tried to be, but at least the "do no evil" kind of kept them in check to some degree. But at some point they bought the corporation-formerly-known-as-DoubleClick, and I think in retrospect that was the beginning of the end of functional idealism in the internet.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress contains a pretty good overview of Amazon’s margins.

Yes You just have to believe that, on the scale on AWS, 1Mbps in Europe costs 0.08$ (includes the transit, the hardware, the people etc). This includes every networking parts : do not forget the switches and stuff : VPC are free, and intra-zone network is free. Someone must pay, so it is sane to assume that "someone" is partly cross-region, partly internet egress, partly cross-zone. Don't forget the R&D that revolves…

> 1Mbps in Europe costs 0.08$

Per month?

Anyway, I can’t tell what your point is, but keep in mind that nearly all the complexity you discuss, and nearly all the hardware needed, applies to within-AZ traffic as well, and AWS doesn’t charge for that.

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#88
post #68
post #14

I hope this is just the start of egress fee changes in response to the European Data Act. Taking a look at other parts of the law's text [1], I think this change related to Article 25, but Article 34 section 2 is what really stands out to me: > Where a data processing service is being used in parallel with another data processing service, the providers of data processing services may impose data egress charges, but o…

My question (and maybe it is answered there but I don't want to read a full legal document to find it). What exactly do they consider "costs"? Is it just the cost they pay an IP for data out or can it include maintenance, hardware, people, etc? I am also curious if this will have any impact on the cost of services. Does AWS do any sort of thing where the higher egress costs offset the cost of services? Or ingress cos…

I don’t work at Amazon nor am I an accountant, but likely your intuition is correct. There’s this managerial accounting strategy called activity based costing (ABC) where you can better map costs (ie real money spent on stuff) to the company outputs; in this case data egress, but it works for all activities (server maintenance, programmer time, etc). You basically take a weighted average of the time and money spent on activities to understand the cost of those activities. This is how Amazon knows the costs of all its services.

The second question is a bit trickier to answer. Amazon has a lot of fixed costs and ABC is one way to allocate those fixed costs (fixed costs = servers). You can also do something similar for the revenues of different AWS services. However, managers will tend to look at revenues and costs together because teasing apart the different revenue streams and their allocated cost structures doesn’t match reality. If you go too deep into that rabbit hole, you lose sight of the true nature of the business. Which is “we buy a shitload of servers up front and rent them to you virtually by the second.” To answer the question, the egress revenue likely dwarfs all the other revenue generating activities at AWS, making the other services look “bad” when comparing revenue to costs. On paper, egress makes up substantially all profit for the business. But this is by design- executives believe that this business model captures the most value so they’re not that interested in jacking up other service costs because overall profitability will be less. Is there subsidization? Yes, but Amazon believes they have the better business by charging users like this vs pricing everything “fairly.”

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#89
post #4

> The waiver on data transfer out to the internet charges also follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to all AWS customers around the world and from any AWS Region. Thank you, EU, on behalf of the rest of the world

It’s way too early to thank them. Wait 5-10 years, see what effect it has on prices, competition etc

Do you think that alternate clouds will offer better or worse pricing and incentives to migrate as a result of this?

Re: Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

#90
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Smith himself never claimed it was that simple. He also wrote on ethics (and regarded that book as more important IIRC). He also warned that those is the same trade would inevitably conspire against the public.

That is weird, people taking a body of work out of context to advance their agenda.

That’s basically all advocates of Adam Smith. I doubt that most of them have even read it — they’d be shocked by what he actually wrote.
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