Comment by jtrtoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtrtoo | Hacker News Reader

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Since it can take a bit of time to read through the invoice, here's a summary of the bill:

CloudFront $1,071 Data Transfer $3,597 EC2 $2,184 S3 $ 228

While "bandwidth" costs equate to ~$4,668/month, only $1,071 is CDN (CloudFront), with the balance just raw Data Transfer.

Since lots of folks are commenting, and not everyone realizes the difference it's also a good time to point out the CloudFront vs. Data Transfer distinction.

Using Amazon's terms... Data Transfer means anything directly served/coming from EC2 or S3 (or a few other services which aren't relevant here), but NOT anything for CloudFront (which is, obviously, a separate line item, as shown above).

The bulk of CDN (CloudFront) usage ($735 worth or 69%) is US.

The bulk of Data raw bandwidth (Data Transfer) usage ($2,931 ~80%) is US East.

Is any of this good/bad/right/wrong? I have no idea. That depends quite a bit on what THEY are doing with it and why. For example, it can be cheaper to distribute from CloudFront versus straight from S3 for some use cases. Though, generally, you are not only looking at using CloudFront to save money over S3 ...there's typically a performance reason.

And sometimes the hosting costs simply don't matter. It's easy for us engineers - siting here on HN - to sit at our keyboards and play around with hypothetical ways to save money. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there are numerous things in IT that it doesn't make sense to optimize. Why? Because the ROI on the engineering time, CapEx, and OpEx (and the time, energy, and focus of ANYONE involved or impacted at all) to do the optimization doesn't outweigh the opportunity cost.

Sometimes there are simply better uses of our limited capital and time.

Not everything needs to be optimized. And the argument gets stronger when there are other factors more difficult to factor in: adopting a platform that isn't as widely known or isn't backed by a similar level of maturity (even with it's quirks, at least they are well known), etc.

The risks/concerns not only vary between organizations, but often from one period of an organization's growth to the next. The beauty is every organization gets to make their own decision ...and none of them have to give a damn if the HN community agrees or not. :-)

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