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Comment by bananaquant | Hacker News Reader

That is fantastic news if true. AWS and two other major cloud providers have done everything in their power to make it painful for businesses to switch off of them. Case in point: egress data fees are something like 80x compared to what the cloud provider actually pays. You still have to pay them in full unless you decide to leave AWS completely.

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Cloudflare R2 - zero egress fees.

IONOS Virtual Private Servers - $30/month - zero egress fees.

Try using Cloudflare R2 with zero egress and you'll rapidly discover there are lots of 'gotchas'... - Want to use a cloudflare managed domain - pay for egress if you have enterprise account - Want to use their 'dev' domain - rate limited

It's still a good service - but zero egress comes with conditions. The only exception I've found is Cloudflare pages which seems genuinely zero egress (as long as you don't proxy it through a managed domain).

I am curious why proxying it through a managed domain incurs additional costs.

Because they can?

I don’t need those things.

Sure it made me pay$5/month after some number of requests.

I don’t expect to pay nothing.

I just think 9 cents per GB for egress is robbery.

Those fees are egregious, but they don't make it any harder to switch off AWS. The cost of the monumental amount of engineering time such a task takes is a couple orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the data egress. It's almost to the point where you wouldn't even bother to factor into a cost calculation.

That doesn't really make sense. AWS is very profitable [1]. That means that whatever the amount of money they put into engineering, their customers pay, and then some.

As for the customers, very few of them operate at a scale that requires the monumental amount of engineering required to replicate the whole of AWS with its many dozens of services.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-reports-...

Setting up a database, backup processes, object storage, archiving, and especially compliance is a huge upfront cost for a small company.

It is true that you pay for the engineering done by AWS, but you also need to take into account the network effect and compatibility with third-parties.

With this being said, AWS is still very expensive. But AWS being profitable doesn't imply it is profitable for you to run your own infrastructure. The same way it is not profitable for you to run your own shipping company, or your own internet backbone provider.

Indeed, that is decided on a case-by-case basis. So if a company determines that moving on-premise is cheaper than AWS, perhaps that is actually true for them.

That entirely depends on how you build your stack.

I always strongly push for setting up the whole infrastructure with a future migration in mind, and without tying the company closely to specific cloud services.

You lose out on some of the better cloud features, but it's worth it in cash alone: being able to say "we have built our stack to be platform agnostic, we can switch within a month" is very useful in discussions with sales...

AWS claiming that on-prem solutions are competition to UK regulators is like Apple insisting the App Store isn't a monopoly to EU regulators, Google asserting that Chrome isn't dominating the web to the DoJ, or Microsoft denying its omnipresence over the workplace. It's laughable. Seriously, did anyone here actually bother to read beyond the headline?

Those are indeed similar situations, but your examples except the first one do not come from the article. So it is not clear why do you assume that everyone did not read beyond the headline.

If you dig into the article, it's evident that AWS is just trying to appease the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. To claim there's no competition would be a monumental blunder, like a government declaring there's no need for a military during a war. They don't really believe that on-prem is serious competition, but they pretend to in order to avoid litigation.

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