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Comment by sl1ck731 | Hacker News Reader

I like the design, but is anyone choosing storage based on price? I can see comparing cloud-to-cloud, but within a single cloud the type of data (blob, block, database, etc...) and the frequency of r/w prescribe the storage you should be using regardless of price.

I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to EBS or such because its 8% of the price. I chose EFS for a reason in the first place.

Not meaning offense, I'm just unsure of usefulness. Appreciate all the content you provide though! Didn't realize who you were :)

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>I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to EBS or such. I chose EFS for a reason in the first place.

How about when your team has terabytes of data stored in EFS that is only used sporadically and now you want to move it off? (maybe you started with EFS because it makes the most sense for your application but now you have a lot of older data that you still want to keep but don't necessarily need it to be accessed by the application anymore). Something like this helps justify how much you could save by starting that migration project.

I do see your point though. IME, calculators like this are used more for management who are trying to estimate their budget for planning purposes (as in, I have a team that tells me they will need 5 TB of S3 storage, how much is that going to cost me?), not necessarily by devs making architecture decisions.

If you have the latitude of moving from file storage to block storage you should already be doing it. I'd say you chose the wrong use case from the start, which also backs up his point.

The point is that you may not be able to use block storage at the start, but as time goes on your needs may change, giving you more latitude.

Would anyone choose glacier over normal S3 if they were both priced the same? I think it's literally the price difference that drives you to choose Glacier for archival data, no?

Price can affect design decisions - i.e. the number of times you access backups for analysis can depend on takeout cost.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Personally, I use this to reinforce architectural change suggestions along the lines of “teach that application to speak to S3 instead of thrice-replicated EBS and you’ll save X.” It’s helpful as a demonstration point.

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