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Comment by rizjoj | Hacker News Reader

and Netflix?

They run BGP and do an enormous amount of IX peering. https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/2906

AWS doesn't even let you do BGP. If you want to use them for a CDN, you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.

They might be using AWS for the canonical store of data, but the sanity of using "the cloud" goes out the window the second you need to ship a lot of traffic to the public internet.

What are you on about? AWS practically requires BGP. Static routing is rarely the best choice when you set up DX.

Netflix rolls its own CDNs because Cloudfront can't meet all their demands, yet.

> heir blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.

For someone not at netflix's level, can you recommend somewhere with significantly cheaper bandwidth.

Any colo or dedicated server provider.

At a CoLo I have the rack, managment, and hardware overhead too, though? Also fewer PoP.

EDIT: I guess I was talking about CloudFront specifically, not EC2. EC2 is pretty pricey.

Price compare various CDNs. It's a commodity business. Fastly comes to mind, but we had quite a few outages with them at my last org.

Pretty much anywhere.

Pretty much anyone... Hetzner, Linode, Choopa

For those I need to run a VPS, which also costs money and has fewer PoP and more mangment overhead.

EDIT: I guess I was talking about CloudFront specifically, not EC2. EC2 is pretty pricey.

Sorry misunderstood. You could try here https://www.cdnperf.com/ and compare egress prices/limits.

While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high.

The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB above 350 TB.

With colocation or renting dedicated servers and IP-transit you can get way lower prices. A dedicated 1 Gbps is about 300 USD/month with my provider, and the prices drops hard for dedicated 10, 40 and 100 Gbps uplinks.

Never used OVH myself, but they are providing 2 Gbps at £340/month for their highest quality bandwidth, and £64/month for bandwidth they think would be good for downloads.

I think using cloud providers for somewhat high bandwidth services are basically throwing money out the window. Until prices really drops(if they ever will) I'll continue thinking that clouds are for temporary workloads or prototyping with the ability to easily scale at a high cost.

> I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment).

Would you mind sharing who that is?

I'm not allowed to say, but I think OVH also runs openstack with the "public cloud" offering, and I think bandwidth are even cheaper with them.

It's interesting that what you consider a great provider is only doing 6 times cheaper than AWS. That's not much of a discount.

I built a global video CDN using SoftLayer a couple years ago and ended up paying around $0.01/GB.

How? https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/content-delivery... (which is linked to from http://www.softlayer.com/) says $0.12/GB.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says $0.085/GB.

At the time they included 20TB of traffic per month per server, and it went into regional pools. I think they discontinued that because of us :)

Packet.net

Below $10k/mo bandwidth plays are irrelevant - the cost of the support infrastructure is just too high.

At $10k/mo what you do is plop a rack in one of the well connected buildings in NYC, VA, SF, SJC, CHI and get either flat rate 10Gs or 1G commits over 10Gs. You should be paying between 0.55 and 0.75 per Mbit/sec on 95th percentile on 1G commit. You put into the same cabinet your edge nodes that actually would be pushing the traffic out and use AWS or GCP for your compute workloads.

> you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.

Wouldn't a customer the size of Netflix be granted more liberty in this regard?

To be fair, Netflix only runs some of their infrastructure on AWS. Basically, if I understand correctly, their applications run on AWS and their delivery is through their own CDN built on top of various ISPs[1].

[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...

Correct, but some is probably an understatment. They are pretty much run everyting on AWS except what you cited (e.g video processing and content delivery). Netflix is the biggest AWS user.

Everything on AWS except their largest, most critical piece of infrastructure that needs to be the highest performing. That says it all right there.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing...

And,

> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.

Source: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

Netflix still operates its own data centers and CDN to deliver video. This is not done on AWS.

Isn't that what I said above?

They have a completely different use case that benefits from being able to scale up and down quickly. I don't see them moving away from AWS anytime soon.

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