Seems neat, but I'm sure this form of hosting attracts fraud and is probably difficult to maintain.
Nobody in their right mind would provision a BitTorrent that could suddenly give you a couple thousand dollar bill if your torrent suddenly got popular.
The possibly ridiculous bandwidth costs probably meant that absolutely nobody was using this.
The torrent would have been a way to get the data from peers instead of serving it purely from S3 outbound.
If this was the only active seed for a torrent and there was nobody else, that would really be a problem.
But otherwise, this should technically result in less outbound bandwidth usage than serving the whole file out of S3.
An AWS connection is going to have WAY more bandwidth than everybody else in the system.
The bittorrent clients would prioritize the AWS seed and suck way more download off of it relative to everybody else in the swarm.
Depends on how popular the torrent is on a local level. Two people on the same LAN probably have better bandwidth to eachother than from AWS. Two people on the same ISP in the same metro might have better bandwidth to each other than AWS if their connections are symmetric or if their ISP has poor transit and peering. Maybe a handful of other scenarios, but even if most of the clients get most of the download from AWS, that's still better for your wallet than all of the clients getting all of the download from AWS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524963
> The tracker Amazon ran was really trigger happy to ban peers (I'm sure it saw tons of bad actors, but still, it made testing really painful especially if you were churning infohashes as you tested new objects). And the seed was somehow painfully slow. Never once did any of my test scenarios see faster downloads than just downloading from S3.
In other words, from a costs perspective, the worst case scenario for BitTorrent is the best case scenario for direct download.
There's no way this had any real users if it is being quietly turned off.
I mean, you're probably right - that none of their $100m contracts were using the feature. But otherwise, why remove it? What was it costing them in maintenance and support? Were there actually any security issues?