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Comment by thamer | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Dev tools says 2,615,081 bytes loaded in 67 requests for the first 2 pages (home page + form).

Some of it is on Akamai as the article describes, but if we had everything on CloudFront and wanted to estimate the cost of 1M orders: 2.38 TiB out + (say) 1 KiB/request * 67M or 67 GiB in: that's $275.50 per 1 million orders (approximately $207 out + $67 in + $1 requests cost).

If we add 1M Lambda executions, we still get $0 since that's the entire free tier. 10M Lambda calls at 50 ms each and 128 MB of RAM cost $1.8, so that's pretty much free as well.

Assuming that CloudFront caching is configured correctly, there would be very few requests to the S3 origin so their cost would be negligible.

Someone please correct me if I've got this completely wrong. Source: https://calculator.aws/ (CF: 2.38 TB + 67 GB + 67M req).

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I can't imagine the federal government is on the normal metered plan though.

They're probably on a contract with a yearly minimum (multi-million) with top tier engineering support, virtually eliminating any concern for individual resources.

This is the government we're talking about. A lot of factors are going to push that pricing up (high profile of the project, risk considerations for AWS, sales team seeing blood, etc)

For sure, I was just curious about the envelope math of it all. The tests themselves ($5 / unit) would certainly dwarf the AWS bill.

That's not how the government engages with AWS and other vendors. Even though the rest of the world sees it as one big entity, they engage as if they're thousands of smaller entities. They generally get access to AWS through resellers, not direct, and from what I've seen, get a pretty substantial pass through reseller discount. And finally, having seen USDS work, I'm fully willing to believe this is hosted in a basic AWS account they're paying for with a credit card that's on it's own stand alone setup. Rapid launch, standup, and fielding an independent thing generally doesn't play well with working inside those big contract/managed environments. I'd be surprised if the USPS was doing anything here but providing DNS and the address API on the backend.

I definitely agree that the government as a whole isn't the end client - it's, of course, some sub org.

But with the SLA and support requirements probably involved, I definitely don't see this running on a basic account.

Having spent uh, 11? years working with AWS for gov entities, I would actually be impressed if they had bothered to turn on support. I also assume, given the nature of the activity involved, that AWS had their solutions team there gratis making sure to remember to request limit increases and stuff.

One thing to mention is that the public sticker price is usually not the end negotiated rate for a large customer like the US government. The final price will be anywhere from 30% to 90% of the public price - a wide range, I know; it depends a lot on the service and their margins. Still, this estimate is probably right within a factor of 2.

$275.50 per 1 million orders

There will be 420 million orders according to sources online, which gets us to $115,710. Very interesting - thank you for the analysis.

I filed a FOIA request to GSA to see how much they spent on the website to build it and any third parties used. They referred me to the FDA, guessing they paid for it.

That's awesome - how did you go about FOIA-ing things? I've always wanted to know more about how to do that.

Its fairly easy actually but you have to be specific or they will charge you $$. So long as you arent wanting like the nuke codes or the location of Hoffa, they are helpful. Last one I did took a few months and I got a big packet in the mail. Cost me $10 or $20 I think.

That's incredibly cheap.

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