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Comment by kbuck | Hacker News Reader

I've assumed this was well-known... AWS has never been a good deal on the billing side. You're paying a huge premium for API access and the strength of the AWS brand.

I was a bit confused as to why Cloudflare was blogging about it until halfway through the article, when The Bandwidth Alliance came in. Makes sense now: they just want to shame Amazon into offering free egress bandwidth to Cloudflare. This is basically a hit piece.

Also, another aside: for hosting providers (AWS included), ingress bandwidth is typically free because it's also basically free for the provider. Outbound dominates so much that the inbound traffic is a rounding error if it's billed by their transit providers at all. But I agree that the high egress prices are a vendor lock-in strategy.

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Perhaps I misunderstood, but the article says Amazon already does not pay for egress to Cloudflare. But Amazon still charges their customers as if they did. Did I misunderstand something?

You sure did. Peering isn’t free, or even cheap. Cloudflare are whining for special treatment for their bandwidth cartel, and AWS are large enough to tell them to get fucked.

The key is realising that Cloudflare have always been about disingenuously leveraging other people’s stuff, since they’re basically just a middleman.

Peering's definitely cheap compared to what Amazon's charging. Amazon even has a peering product for 16.5 cents per Mbps, but it's not usable in this circumstance.

"Please join our free peering group of many companies." is neither a cartel nor a request for special treatment.

What are they "disingenuously leveraging"?

Everyone else’s content. Cloudflare purport to provide edge services. Their free product will actually increase your TTI and reduce your overall availability. Cloudflare’s business model is to lower the marginal cost of their revenue-generating business by increasing their overall volumes, and every new sucker on the free plan helps.

As ever, if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.

Having AWS give them something for nothing in that regard is a) part of trying to establish themselves as an equivalent tier player (they’re not) and b) leverage that access to get better deals elsewhere.

AWS are likely not stupid enough to get suckered into increasing Cloudflare’s market power for no return, and the resort to faux-analytical self-aggrandising content marketing is a weak attempt at improving negotiating position.

Amazon will particularly hate it because it’s framed so negatively, which is culturally antithetical. If this is the shit that Cloudflare will wring out of their dirty laundry in public, I shudder to imagine how poisonous their internal tone just be.

The content ring is part of their traffic boosting goal and sure it’s a cartel. It’s a group of natural competitors, setting prices as a club.

> As ever, if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.

Okay but I care about this purely as an AWS customer. I've used them and want to use them more, and have never used cloudflare.

> Having AWS give them something for nothing

> AWS are likely not stupid enough to get suckered into increasing Cloudflare’s market power for no return

By this logic, should they never drop egress prices at all? Should they actually raise them?

And Amazon doesn't get "no return" for dropping prices. It brings them more users.

Some of the other big clouds also have huge egress fees, but there are lots of providers that don't, and many users move to those specifically for that reason.

The biggest reason to keep egress fees up is to keep a high incentive for users to stay inside the walled garden of a single cloud, and that's very anti-competition and therefore anti-consumer.

> The content ring is part of their traffic boosting goal and sure it’s a cartel. It’s a group of natural competitors, setting prices as a club.

Peering should be extremely cheap though. And that only helps customers.

"Hey everyone, let's collaborate to reduce our profit margin on this product to merely high levels." is not a bad thing, and it doesn't fit the definition of a cartel either.

I recommend reading the Peering Playback. It will open your eyes to the reality of the situation. It sounds like you want lower prices, that’s fine, but don’t latch onto the swill that cloudflare are peddling. It’s a super distorted, self-interested view.

In fact, given the scale disparity, peering with Cloudflare likely increases AWS’s marginal costs.

Ultimately, Cloudflare are a rent-seeking middleman, and antithetical to the end-to-end architecture to boot.

> In fact, given the scale disparity, peering with Cloudflare likely increases AWS’s marginal costs.

Look, I don't care how it's done at a technical level. If they'd like to just stop charging so much, with no routing changes, that's fine too. The problem is that I can get full transit service for a tiny fraction of what AWS charges for egress. I want a competitive price. And I don't care how selfish cloudflare is being while they highlight a real problem with AWS that's been obvious for many years. Their selfishness doesn't make what they're saying 'swill' either.

And it's pretty hard to distort "this is how much egress costs to supply, rounding up. this is how much amazon charges.". Is their number egregiously wrong? It's reasonably in line with what I've researched in the past.

> I can get full transit service for a tiny fraction of what AWS charges for egress.

That is rather the point: all you get is a full transit service, and the false equivalence is palpable.

I'm very much reminded of the equally fictitious comparisons made between EC2 and Hetzner, or racking up white-box servers.

> I don't care how it's done at a technical level

That is not something I would personally recommend bragging about on this forum, especially when it leads to sleepwalking into accepting a snake-oil salesman's contrived misrepresentations.

> That is rather the point: all you get is a full transit service, and the false equivalence is palpable.

False equivalence how? AWS's offering isn't better, it's just expensive.

> That is not something I would personally recommend bragging about on this forum, especially when it leads to sleepwalking into accepting a snake-oil salesman's contrived misrepresentations.

1. What a rude way to interpret what I said. I don't have a preference between different options to deliver data that all work fine. I'm interested to know what happens, but it doesn't affect my purchasing.

2. Nothing you've said backs up the idea of this being "snake oil". They're not making any promises about amazing products that can't be delivered. They're just asking for a price change on an existing product. That doesn't even resemble snake oil.

You’re not buying transit from AWS.

This pig-headed insistence on comparing things that are not alike, and then complaining when called out for disregarding the details, doesn’t warrant further comment.

You haven't named a single difference. You insist on vaguely insulting me and ignoring me when I ask why they should be treated differently.

They're both delivering packets from a datacenter in a specific spot to anywhere on the planet. They're charged based on different metrics, but it's easy to make a rough translation between those metrics.

I ask if the numbers are wrong, you insult me.

I ask why it's a false equivalence, you insult me.

And you think I'm the one not contributing to this conversation?

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