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Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

bitsand.cloud

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Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#2
S3 is a nice trick. More tricks:

1. Ask for discounts if you are a big AWS customer (e.g., spend $1mln+/year). At some point, they were huge for inter-AZ transfers.

2. Put things in one AZ. Running DB in "b" zone and your only server in "a" is even worse than just standardizing on one zone.

3. When using multiple AZ do load aware AZ balancing.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#3
An 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’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#4

An 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…

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Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#5

An 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…

Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#6
post #2

S3 is a nice trick. More tricks: 1. Ask for discounts if you are a big AWS customer (e.g., spend $1mln+/year). At some point, they were huge for inter-AZ transfers. 2. Put things in one AZ. Running DB in "b" zone and your only server in "a" is even worse than just standardizing on one zone. 3. When using multiple AZ do load aware AZ balancing.

4. Activate S3 Inteligent-Tier storage class?

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#7

An 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…

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There are a slew of reasons why people say this. Generalizing HN folks as "dumb" doesn't help your point either.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#8
post #2

S3 is a nice trick. More tricks: 1. Ask for discounts if you are a big AWS customer (e.g., spend $1mln+/year). At some point, they were huge for inter-AZ transfers. 2. Put things in one AZ. Running DB in "b" zone and your only server in "a" is even worse than just standardizing on one zone. 3. When using multiple AZ do load aware AZ balancing.

4. Activate S3 Inteligent-Tier storage class?

This is great for saving on S3 storage costs!

But in the context of data transfer costs, this would actually increase the costs, because there's a small surcharge for Intelligent Tiering - and the only relevant storage class for sidestepping data transfer costs is standard storage (because it's the only one with free download), so Intelligent Tiering won't provide value.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#9
post #5

An 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…

Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?

you'd be harder pressed finding ones that do (before a reasonable limit).

tilaa.com

vultr.com

hetzner.com

linode.com

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#10

An 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…

> 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 fluctuation in you needs (storage, compute, etc...), cloud based solution can be a great fit.

At the end of the day, it is just a tool. I worked in places where I SSH´d into the prod bare-metal server to update our software, manage the firewall, check the storage, ... and all that manually. And I worked in places where we were using a cloud provider for most of our hosting needs. I also handle the transition from one to the other. All I can say is: It's a tool. "The cloud" is no better or worse than a bare-metal server or a VPS. It really depends on your use-case. You should just do your due diligence and evaluate the reason why one would fit you more than the other, and reevaluate it from time to time depending on the changes in your environment.

This whole "cloud bad" is just childish.

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