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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Because AWS doesn’t actually want to collect the egress fees. They want you to avoid egress entirely for high-value services, which has all kinds of excellent implications for AWS:

Third party SaaS offerings that move large amounts of data are effectively forced to host in AWS.

Want a small number of high-value servers (e.g. big GPUs, etc) in your own data center or colo to use for non-availability-critical purposes integrated with the rest of your AWS stack? You’d better price in egress!

Want to gradually transition to a competing cloud? Good luck, egress will bankrupt you before you finish the transition.

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amluto is spot on. AWS don't want to make money off of egress, they want to make it non-viable to move anything out of AWS that isn't being served to an end consumer.

Time to move hosting back in house.

It is because amulo has a point is why Cloudflare stands a good chance to disrupt AWS in at least few market segments, if not all.

More: https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/

I wonder, if you made a video streaming app on top of AWS you could negotiate a significant reduction of fees, since you're not ruining their business by transferring out valuable data to competitors. And if that's the case, I wonder if that constitutes a breach of net neutrality in practice, since in practice, a major part of bandwidth costs will depend on what kind of information you are transferring.

My suspicion is that not even Netflix gets the egress out of AWS at commodity market rate. The vast majority of traffic will be handled by their own CDN

You don't need to speculate. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

Your link has no information about their egress pricing with AWS which is the only thing I was speculating about.

Netflix doesn't pay anything for egress of video because it doesn't serve any video from AWS.

As for everything else, AWS offers tiered pricing for everyone and it's the same for everyone. They just don't publish the tiers at that level, but yes, Netflix pays less than you probably do because they're in the higher tier -- but they pay the same as all the other companies at that tier.

Thanks! I had been curious about that for quite some time now.

> Want to gradually transition to a competing cloud? Good luck, egress will bankrupt you before you finish the transition.

They do offer the Snowball to lower transfer out cost, they also offer Direct Connect which is more convenient and can be cheaper.

For sure it won't be cheap, but being able to transfer 100 TB for less than 3k isn't too bad. Storing that on S3 would cost you nearly that per month... if you can't spare a month of cost to migrate, you may want to rethink your pricing.

For Direct Connect, they still charge for egress.

> For Direct Connect, they still charge for egress.

They do for both Snowball and Direct Connect, but it's 2 cents per GB, which is what I used to give the 3k estimate.

That still sounds like price fixing, but for a different purpose.

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