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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

That's both a good and a terrible change.

- The price reduction on S3 is good! Kudos AWS.

- The price change on glacier is a fucking disaster. They replaced the _single_ expensive glacier fee with the choice among 3 user selectable fee models (Standard, Expedited, Bulk). It's an absolute nightmare added on top of the current nightmare (e.g. try to understand the disks specifications & pricing. It takes months of learning).

I cannot follow the changes, too complicated. I cannot train my devs to understand glacier either, too much of a mess.

AWS if you read this: Please make your offers and your pricing simpler, NEVER more complicated.

(Even a single pricing option would be significantly better than that, even if its more expensive.)

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I wrote the post after spending all of about 15 minutes learning about this new feature. We did make things simpler.

> AWS if you read this: Please make your offers and your pricing simpler, NEVER more complicated.

I am reading this. We made them simpler. Decide how quickly you need your data, express your need in the request, and that's that. If you read the post you will see that these options encompass three distinct customer use cases.

I believe this HUGELY simplifies glacier pricing.

I don't think you understand just how insanely, incredibly, bizarrely complicated the old glacier pricing was.

There are 3 pricing models for S3, the 3rd one (glacier) having 3 sub-pricing models to be chosen at time of requests.

I don't think you realize how insanely complex the entire S3 pricing model once you get out of the "standard price".

Maybe I just have too much empathy for my poor devs and ops who try to understand how much what they're doing is gonna cost them. It's only one full page, both sided, of text after all.

I'm not saying that S3 isn't complicated, or that the pricing model, even after the changes, isn't nuts.

I'm saying that anyone who thinks this is more complicated than it was does not understand just how crazy glacier pricing was before. Three static glacier pricing tiers is a lot better than the previously system which is so complex that earlier versions of the AWS pricing page just gave up and called it "free".

(Briefly: The old Glacier model's pricing wasn't based around data transfer, but on your automatically retroactively provisioned data transfer capacity based on your peak data transfer rate, billed on a sliding scale as if you'd maintained that rate for the entire month. There's probably a less intuitive way to bill people for downloading data, but if so I've never seen it. It was a system seemingly designed to prevent users from knowing what any given retrieval would cost.)

Is that really that much different than hard drives? No hard drive manufacturer uses the same standards to determine how much space there will actually be on the disk. You can get hard drives that spin at many different RPMs. You can get hard drives with many different connector types. Drives with different numbers of platters. An 8TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive is not going to have the same seek time as a 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive.

There are so many combinations of hard drives that will result in different performance for different situations all with different costs. Then you start talking about cold storage as well and you've moved into other media formats.

Just because there is a page worth of a pricing model doesn't mean AWS or any cloud provider is doing anything incorrectly. You're paying for on demand X and engineers who are going to utilize that should understand it as well as they would understand how to build an appropriate storage solution of their own. On demand just means now they don't have to take the time to design, implement and operate it themselves.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for our products, but this is a huge step forward for S3 customers. I think it's fair to say you find Glacier too complicated (it's part of the reason Coldline doesn't look like that), but to say this new setup is worse just isn't true.

I can assure you that if AWS had announced a simple flat-rate structure that was more expensive for everyone there would be plenty of unhappy existing customers. It's a tough call to balance simplicity and efficiency, by making this complex for you, they allow you to opt-in to the "screw it, give me my bytes back as fast as you can" model. You could just pretend that's the only option ;).

Again, I'm not criticizing your unhappiness with the complexity of Glacier. But I think it's only fair to recognize that the folks at AWS have just released a major improvement that provides real value for some customers.

Disclosure: I work at Google Cloud.

This is a good change. The stupid former "rate-based" system meant that if you stored a large file (say, 10GB), you'd have had to pay quite a bit of money if you tried to retrieve just that file. After all, you can't control the rate at which you retrieve one file.

I'm ignorant to exactly how Glacier's API works, but what's stopping you from reading bytes from the socket at any rate you want (for a single file)? e.g. what is stopping me from doing 128KB/s with this code:

    byte[] buffer = new byte[128*1024];
    while(socket.read(buffer) != -1) {
        // do something with buffer here
        Thread.sleep(1000);
    }

The rate pertains to Glacier's "retrieval" of the file and making it available for download, not the reading of the file from your end.

(If you end up never downloading the file, you still get charged)

Simple is easy to shop around. Their goal is not to make pricing simple, don't hold your breath.

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