This is a loophole. Hitting some loss leader at AWS, but if everyone only buys the $1 hotdog and nothing else then the $1 hotdog gets removed.
Maybe raising the cost of transient storage? e.g. If you have to pay for a minimum of a day's storage - but even if that was the case this would still be cost-effective, and at any rate it seems very unnatural for AWS to charge on such granularity.
+ I would guess that S3 is orders of magnitude more profitable for AWS than cross-AZ charges, so I'm not sure they'd consider it a loss-leader.
It would definitely piss a lot of people off as it is adding to their bill, but it could likely be done in a way that makes exploiting this for just data transfer not worth it without adding huge costs to most "real" use cases.
That being said, that'd be sort of "mean" of AWS to do - the data is already replicated across AZs whether you pay for it or not because of how S3 works.
What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious to anyone doing the math that it can't cost that much, otherwise a 200GB CoD install would be costing the ISP $20.
Of course it’s also a zero interest rate phenomenon. We are exiting a >10 year era when the name of the game was simply to grow and anything in your way could be dealt with by just throwing money at it. Nobody cared about cost as long as growth numbers went up.
The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle.
So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?
Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month.
Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.
I hear you, and that is an egregious margin. Just wondering if part of their bandwidth pricing calculation is driven by a goal of constraining their infrastructure costs (or other considerations beyond profit). I'm actually wondering this exactly because it is so egregious.
There is of course a thing wherein if something is free people mindlessly use it. If all AWS customers did this with bandwidth, I wonder how it would impact total usage and AWS's subsequent infrastructure considerations.
I'm no fan of their pricing and I'm sure there's an unhealthy dose of greed in there. Your phrasing just prompted me to consider what other factors might also be involved. And, if part of the rationale is actually to influence customer behavior with disincentives, then by definition there would have to be some pain involved.
I am almost certain there will be some sort of cartel investigation into this pricing between the big cloud players.
It serves two purposes for them. One is obviously a nice profit center. The other is that free ingress but expensive egress causes data to flow in but not out, creating a center of gravity and a form of lock in.
They're not paying for bandwidth, but their connections are not asymmetric, so they need to balance egress and ingress or they will incur fees or dropped traffic.
The pricing is there to maintain this balance. Since they're obviously egress heavy, it makes sense for them to charge for egress, and make ingress free.
People think AWS is using costs to "tax" you, what they're really doing is using to control the shape and size of their traffic.
Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streaming, game servers, TURN servers, video conferencing relays, etc.
I find it hard to believe that AWS or GCP are getting core Internet bandwidth on worse terms than much smaller companies like Vultr, Hivelocity, Datapacket, or OVH.
I call BS.
They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "cheap bandwidth" you have to be prepared to run 100s of VMs per provider, and have to consider provisioning VMs you don't need just to get access to another $5 TB of transfer, or you're just going to end up paying the per GB fee anyways.
The terms aren't worse, but the service and their guarantees are different. Again, if you ask AWS for a bandwidth deal, they'll cut you one within a few minutes that will more than halve the price of your transfer if you pay up front. Which is AWSs way of saying, "if you make your usage predictable, we can make it way cheaper."
Why? Because they have fixed _capacity_ on their links. The costs manage that _capacity_.
In my experience GCP and AWS are pretty unwilling to budge on bandwidth pricing unless you are very large and making a long commitment. If you are not spending six figures a month forget about it.
You may be right about SLA but I run large volume services out of bare metal providers and do not experience meaningful packet loss or down time in practice. Bandwidth costs are easily hundreds of times less than AWS or GCP.
I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is significant and approaches overage pricing at VPS providers.
I'm sure. If I were running things that were more bandwidth heavy as opposed to integration heavy, we would have gone that route as well, and we would have gone through the extra trouble of getting some provider diversity and redundancy built in.
For smaller cases, they can avoid all that overhead and just trade those into bandwidth costs. Which, if your costs do get high, it's much easier to build an external caching network then it is to build a bunch of external dependent infrastructure with bare metal providers.
In any case, I don't think it's that AWS is taxing it's users unfairly, I think the costs are a solid reflection of where their engineering effort and variable costs are concentrated. It seems like maintaining symmetry in bandwidth is one of those.
As a customer I can use petabytes one month and then zero bytes the next month. They have link agreements with multi year terms and possible "balance payments" required if symmetry is not maintained. This type of bandwidth isn't as cheap to provide under these terms.
I'm not sure you how get a 200x multiplier from per GB prices when the list prices are not per GB of transfer but per GB of capacity. Or are you taking a 1Gb/s price average of $1000/mo and then assuming 100% egress activity on this pipe then multiplying a full month of this 100% usage by the AWS price and dividing the two? I get around 230x there, but this is not a practical comparison, and these types of links are quite different than a standard COLO, so you're in for quite a bit of overhead.
Plus, if you actually used this much bandwidth on AWS, 2.5PB, you could get nearly a 10x break in pricing, bringing the multiple down to 23x. If you didn't try to pre purchase the multiple would be something like 80x because of their built in automatic tiering.
In terms of CloudFront I'm getting a global caching layer. In terms of EC2 I get the VPC. I'm getting quite a bit more than just the bandwidth. In terms of luck, we feel we don't need it because we've actually sat down and calculated the costs (even all the above) for running the type of product we're running, and it's /far cheaper/ to do it entirely inside AWS.
This is all assuming you actually wanted to discuss this on merit.
I get there is more to it than just transit. But VPC has loads of additional costs for NAT etc. Same with cloudfront.
Cloudflare can basically give everyone virtually unlimited free bandwidth on their S3 equivalent.
It's so preposterous to think that this reflects real cost that I find it funny, I didn't mean to be obnoxious.
At 7c/GB that would be over 10500$ just for the traffic alone, and probably about the same for the processing power.
Some how AWS has to rip you off so if there is a non rip off gateway to the ripoff then if you can use the non rip off to avoid another rip off, they will close the “loophole”.