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Comment by jiggywiggy | Hacker News Reader

It was always unbelievable too me how much they hosted for free. I recklessly pushed over 100gbs of containers the last years, all free. Never made sense to me, even google doesn't do this anymore.

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There are techniques to compress and dedup redundancies... I doubt it is real 100gbs on their disks...

Even so...storage is not free.

Looking at the rates of enterprise storage costs compared to what Google or Apple charges consumers - I was surprised by how subsidized people's photo libraries are.

oh that's completely different. They want you to host your photos with them because then you can never leave their platform.

Apple does a pretty bad job of it then, because I have a local copy of my entire photo library too on an external hard drive. It’s quite nice really, cloud storage plus a local copy. I guess it’s somewhat of a moat because switching to some other cloud provider or my own system will be more expensive?

obviously hn readers will know how to copy the photos to their own computer. most people won't and that's the point

No I’m saying that Apple Photos literally copies to a local library automatically if you have a mac and open Photos.app. I didn’t even have to set it up. My partner did the same thing, and she’s decidedly not tech savvy. It’s one of the only reasons I ended up paying for Apple One for the 2TB cloud storage, is because of how easy they made it.

And it's different in more ways than one. Hosting the images is just one fraction of the features that you get with Apple or some other provider. Searching, albums, sharing, are all baked in services that are still cheaper than, say, going through S3 and having a bucket with similar storage.

They are not, but actual usage is typically a single-digit % of promised space. So power users are served at cost (or even at loss), but the overwhelming majority of users are actually overpaying for what they use.

I just compared the price of 2TB on backblaze B2 and Google Drive, they were roughly the same price. Google doesn't charge for bandwidth, but it's also against the ToS to do anything that would result in lots of downloads anyway.

Google also charges a flat rate for 2TB with the next lowest plan being 200GB. So the majority of users are paying for 2TB but not using anything close to that much. I suspect consumer storage is also much easier to offload to hard drives and tape backups while files on S3/B2 would mostly require SSDs with some probably being stored in ram.

It's still 100gb over the wire and those bandwidth costs add up, especially if it's a popular image used by tons of projects.

yes, but the downward traffic costs (via docker pull) are likely their main expense, not the upward transfer.

We are even using Docker Hub to store and distribute VM images... The so-called "container disk image" format is sticking a qcow2 file in a Docker image and storing it on a Docker registry.

https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/blob/main/containerimag...

There is a way to go from that status quo to a new and sustainable one; it requires actual engineering of the state change.

That has not seemed to have happened here, or not happened well.

Nobody expected it to be free forever; I think we expected the transition to be a lot more orderly. There have been years to prepare.

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