91–100 of 130 posts
> 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
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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
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.
I think interpreting this in a modern context, "religious" can be translated as "ethical"
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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…
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.
And some architectures are still prohibited - any replicated database across cloud vendors - imagine Cassandra hosted across AWS and Azure to protect against one cloud vendor outage.
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 Ube…
I have to say, talking to AWS and GCP, the AWS marketing, onboarding, and support arm are far far far far far superior to google's. In fact they are so far apart that our management has blatantly discarded google as even an option for moving our infra over because of how terrible our interactions have been. I'm all for de-throning the king, but it ain't gonna be done by the court jester.
In any case, point is, AWS has good strategy where it matters most.
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 mana…
An interesting question: why does AWS charge so much for egress knowing that it could dissuade some currently-on-prem use cases? It definitely forces optimization, use of CDNs, compression, etc. Previously it likely reduced transfers to another provider, but as the parent alludes to, the use of managed services makes sticking to AWS much more likely. What else?
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…
There's a bunch of providers in Europe that will give you a whole server for €50/month with unmetered 1gbps networking. Or, as I like to consider it, €50/month for 1 gbps networking, and you get a free server.
Yeah, their networks may not have as much complexity and features as AWS, but I've never found any of that complexity appealing. Keep your network simple and let your hosts do the work.
EU – actually, it must be free.
Big tech firms – free and open competition is integral to society, and we value freedom of choice over anything else, so of course data transfer is free for our valued customers.
> Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet. Damn, that's a lot of tiny customers. 100 GB per month is less than what many use on their phone during a month. So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.
You can have terabytes of data for internal purposes, analytics, etc. That never moves out of the data center except when you want to migrate.
Small companies download reports/analytics/files from X and upload them to Y, etc, big companies do it all inside.
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The law mandates egress to be free or at provider cost when two data processing services are used in parallel; AWS, OTOH, provides it free (better than is minimally required!) and to customers not protected by the law at issue (also more than required!) but only when migrating off of AWS , not when using AWS alongside another service, so (assuming it continues to charge much more than their cost for all other egress)…
It’s rare for large companies to immediately comply with the spirit of the law. See EU261 for example - airlines were dragged kicking and screaming through the courts over many years. Amazon’s behaviour isn’t surprising, but you’re not wrong to call it out
If you do it early, you're at a disadvantage (unless you can market it heavily, which usually only is if you're the small player already).