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This entire post is just unnecessary fear-mongering.

>Also, "500GB/mo.", at launch. Let's not forget those generous free limits can be slashed whenever it suits, and why they might be so generous for launch at all.

AWS has, to my knowledge, never increased the cost of any service after launch. They do, however, have a long history of reducing prices.

You also completely neglected to mention this part:

>Simply authenticating with an AWS account increases free data bandwidth up to 5 TB each month when pulling images from the internet. And finally, workloads running in AWS will get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling publicly shared images hosted on AWS.

So yes, AWS gives some incentive to create an AWS account, and an even further incentive to use AWS services. All I can say to that is... duh?

The problem is not that they give incentives. It's why they give incentives. Why do they want marketshare? It's simple, they're a business, they want to milk you for money.

And like their forebears they understand well that the more they lock you into their solutions the more likely you are to keep paying for money even when you're mad at them for something they inevitably do that you don't agree with.

Oh the horror of a business that wants to make money off of the services they are offering!

Do you work for a company that just gives away all of their services and products for free, or...?

You're a funny guy. Nothing is wrong with a business making money. What's wrong with Amazon is that they're going to make extra money through extortionate business practices and you're going to be shit out of luck looking for an alternative after they crush all of their competitors in ways that are not healthy to a functioning market.

The pricing (or lack of pricing, actually, since the only thing mentioned in the post is that people get 5TB/mo of transfer for free and AWS makes no money directly from this) is actually less costly than Docker Hub's new model. Are you telling me that Docker Hub is extortionate, too? Come on.

Also once you have 5TB/mo in container transfer bandwidth, you probably can spare a couple employees to set up your own solution if you can't use AWS. You can't realistically use that much in a smallish company.

1. The company I work for is already fully locked into AWS with years of work needed to go anywhere else.

2. Duh, this is an incentive to move to their cloud. Duh duh duh. Basically everything any corporation does is in some way intended to keep you locked into their system.

3. The company that I work for pays Amazon A LOT of money every year. As in, millions a year and almost certainly a month, too. If this allows us to pull images without limits, avoid having a separate billing agreement with DockerHub, and provides faster speeds from the regions where we're deployed in AWS, then this is a compelling offering from Amazon and my company would likely consider it.

>fully locked into AWS with years of work needed to go anywhere else

That’s the thing that I don’t understand... unless you’re treating cloud vendors like a traditional on-premise data center, you’ve already got lock in. And if you do treat them like data centers, it’s going to cost a lot more than just running a data center.

And if you decide to switch from AWS to Azure or GCP or Oracle, what happens to all your engineers who specialize in AWS? Are they going to forget everything they know and go learn something brand new and start from scratch? Or are they going to just quit and find a job working with AWS that they already know? You’re already locked in to every tech decision you make, and if you make the decision to not be locked in, you’re locked in to only vendors who don’t have lock-in which is a form of lock-in itself. Either way you’re gonna be paying a lot more than your competitors who are just focused on running their business.

It’s wishy-washy lack of decision making. No one cares about your tech stack, just pick one and get back to running your business.

> This entire post is just unnecessary fear-mongering.

You perhaps missed the bottom 30% suggesting there may be better options.

Docker's registry protocol treats layers essentially as opaque slabs, as any user will no doubt be aware, where update of a single timestamp or byte of a file could mean the reupload (and download) of a potentially unlimited amount of data. While that architecture has its perks (simplicity, sequential IO patterns suited to the magnetic disks of 2013), there are obvious downsides.

We have plenty of systems just like Docker capable of managing Docker-like file counts without the obscene bandwidth abuse, we just don't call them registries. They have names like Perforce, Subversion and even (some Microsoft variant) of Git. Eliminating the data gravity angle is impossible, but reducing its potency by several orders of magnitude is not only possible but has already been done repeatedly in many popularly deployed systems.

This is not to suggest replacing registry with Git, but perhaps some graph-like manifest format combined with some new "fetch-multiple-objects" protocol verb would be all required to bring the cost of running a registry down to essentially a non-issue.

You seem to be all over the place with your issues. Are you mad that AWS has bandwidth limits, or are you mad that AWS is encouraging the use of Docker altogether, or do you just have some kind of vendetta against the boogeyman that is AWS?

Docker registries are how things are done right now. And the changes to Docker Hub that happened this week have a significant impact on the Docker ecosystem. This announcement is about solving that impact now, because developers need a solution now. This doesn't have anything to do with any hypothetical improvements to the Docker ecosystem or Docker data usage that may otherwise be in progress by [insert company here].

For commercial use, $45/month is a low enough cost to be noise for many businesses (even though the bandwidth transfer markup is eye watering). If it’s breaking your budget, you can always pull and then push to another registry (it’s just tarballs after all) or build new images from scratch with your Dockerfiles. Open source projects and similar cost sensitive use cases might consider https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr

Docker Hub is similar to Youtube in the sense that it’s a whole lot of bandwidth and storage used and someone has to pay for it. Could you run your own? Time is expensive. Don’t unless you absolutely have to.

$45/mo would be the minimum payment, assuming the free limit announced today actually lasted. Let's say they begin crying 12 months from now and knock it down even by 50%, now you're looking at $810 minimum per year per client site. Multiply that up by, say, 1000 sites, and you're starting to look at a "free" service that might completely pay for its own development within a year or two.

That has historically not been the direction AWS prices go, but as I mention in my other comment, it’s trivial to move if AWS tries to put you over a barrel. Object storage is a commodity, and Docker images are objects, so shrug. It would be cool if Cloudflare supported container registry primitives backed by user provided Backblaze B2 bucket config info, for example (maybe you can do this with workers?).

Properly parameterize your build/CI scripts (in this case, your container registry host and how to auth against it) for portability. Portability is your insurance against poor service provider behavior.

This sounds more like the Oracle model than AWS.

Or exactly what Docker just did if you squint a bit.

In which case, just move.

Sure, but say your engineers cost you $100/hr, and every hour beyond 2,000hrs per year they work, they become more unhappy.

I think it's worth spending the 8 hours/yr/site, supposing you have relatively few sites. Plus, your engineers for 1hr/month will never achieve the same SLAs that AMZN will.

For smallish numbers of sites, it seems like the AMZN solution is fine. For bigger ones, there is always enterprise pricing :-)

Does AWS raise prices like this (I know Oracle does - OUCH).

I've yet to be hit by one of these price increases and have been on AWS since the beginning. Until I migrated they supported my SimpleDB app FOREVER (I mean, it wasn't even on website at one point but the calls still worked!).

A small part of AWS success must be because of this confidence they will stick around, keep a service running.

Unlike other companies AWS understands how to keep customers and maintain good will. They start with moderate prices and then decrease them as they better understand the market. Never increase them. You won't see the same great initial deals from AWS as other providers (ie: Google Kubernetes) but you can be certain your deal won't go away.

For what it’s worth I’m not aware of AWS ever slashing a free tier or increasing pricing, though they do so much that I definitely could have missed something. Does anyone know of any examples particularly of them slashing a free tier later?

Everyone is beating him for his incorrect predictions about AWS pricing changes.

But nobody focuses on the most important point: Somehow AWS can give you a lot of egress traffic for free, something _you_ would pay a lot of money for. This is clearly showing that egress pricing is heavily inflated so every cloud can print a lot of money.

Egress pricing is there for another reason as well. It's meant to make it hard to move out of AWS.

If one looks at the pricing for AWS Snowball [0], their bulk data transfer device, there's no per gigabyte cost to get data into AWS, but $0.03/GB to get data out. I'm pretty sure the bits are just as heavy coming into AWS as they are coming out. :-)

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

I think it's also a convenient way to get rid of piracy and garbage content.

You can't host MegaFileShare on AWS because it would cost too much and AWS doesn't have to bother about useless legal discussions since your value to them as a customer is really low for this use case.

Not necessarily. When bandwidth balances you can get peering agreements, but AWS will be very server heavy. Moving data in would just improve their ratios and help them reduce their own costs, so, it makes sense to make it free.

In regards to "But it'll always be like that regardless of provider", it's worth noting that distributed file-systems are situated perfectly to provide a torrent-like way of downloading containers. Self-blog just because it's easily at hand: https://blog.bonner.is/docker-registry-for-ipfs/

Switching Docker registries is kind of really easy so I wouldn't sweat it.