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Comment by IceHegel | Hacker News Reader

Something is very off. The post claims an 8000% markup but others have pointed out that AWS is in line with other cloud providers and the same math shows cloudflare with a ~3800% markup. From u/andrewguenther:

AWS Egress - $0.09/GB

Azure Egress - $0.0875/GB

GCP Egress - $0.11/GB

Alibaba Egress - $0.123

Cloudflare - $0.09/GB pre-April 2021 $0.045 now

1. If AWS is charging me $6 per Mbps for something that costs them 8¢, why is Cloudflare charging me $3 for the same 8¢ good?

2. What is going on with the price of the underlying technologies that make up network capacity. Is it just fiber and switches? Are these costs going down?

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> Something is very off. The post claims an 8000% markup but others have pointed out that AWS is in line with other cloud providers

None of the biggest ones are trying to compete on egress. Especially because, why make it easy to run some of your services outside their cloud? Please move it all in to the same place and dedicate your budget to them.

> Cloudflare - $0.09/GB pre-April 2021 $0.045 now

That's not general egress, that's one random service optimized for using more CPU time. If you use the less-CPU-time version, bandwidth is free/negligible.

> What is going on with the price of the underlying technologies that make up network capacity. Is it just fiber and switches? Are these costs going down?

Better tech allows vastly increasing amounts of data to flow through the same wires using the same amount of equipment. The price per unit goes up, but the price per byte goes down.

Buying 1 Mibps means you can use up to 1Mibps. Paying $/GiB means you can use 100s of Gibps for a split second and only pay the $/GiB fee.

In the past i did a TCO comparison for a large spikey workload where the $/GiB cost even at list was cheaper than allocating enough bandwidth for peak events.

At small scale the $/Mibps likely comes out cheaper, but for any large company sitting on 100s of Gibps of excess capacity for an event that occurs once or twice a year, or a few hours per day is very costly and might eat up savings from p99/p95th billing.

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