I can't remember the last time there was this much interest in a new product launch - which gives an indication to the market need for pricing changes on this front. However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side.
Removing egress feed is not just about taking a massive hit to revenue. If it was, they might bite the bullet and hope that the lower prices would attract more customers in the long term. But bandwidth pricing is the moat around their castle. If it didn’t exist, Snowflake and others would leave. But more than that, new AWS services benefit from the captive audience choosing them by default. Without the moat, each service has to compete on its merits. AWS Lambda, for example would need to be better than CloudFlare Workers or fly.io containers. It won’t win customers like it does today just because it’s “free” bandwidth.
They won’t rush to announce anything that might affect the foundation of their multi billion dollar money printing machine. They’ll take their time and see how customers react. If any large customer threatens to leave, they’ll be offered credits to stay. But that information about what customers want and what they’re likely to do will help them come up with a strategy.
My contention, as I've commented here before, is that AWS is taking advantage of a new "cloud native" generation of developers, startup founders, C-suite, etc who have never purchased bandwidth/transit, run an AS (autonomous system), etc. As mentioned in the twitter thread Amazon is essentially charging 1998 prices for bandwidth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of their services are essentially loss-leaders and Amazon more than makes up for it with their ridiculous markup on bandwidth.
This "cloud native" generation can wrap their heads around instances, request rates, storage volume, K8s, containers, functions, etc but the pricing on bandwidth is very nebulous, notoriously difficult to estimate/control, and poorly understood. Without organizational experience and knowledge of the real bandwidth costs in 2021 the assumption is likely "well, that's just what bandwidth costs".
Call me a pessimist, but I expect that will happen around the same time they make managed NAT gateways reasonably priced.
I'm going to say never. I'll likely be right for years before I am eventually wrong due to the sticker price not moving but inflation making it relatively affordable.
Go ahead AWS, prove me wrong!
Being a proxy is cool.
Kudos to all involved in this project! :)
They would also bring cloudflare in the spotlight and they already have the core products as a cloud hoster ( rdbms, nosql, serverless, apps, ... ).
Additionally, reducing eggres and making use of 3rd party products possible is not in their interest long term ( eg. The fork of elastic search).
What do you think they can do/announce?