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"Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges." Disagree. There's n

"Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges." Disagree. There's no false advertising here, they're making you pay for their service and convenience of using a combined [Paas, Iaas, Saas ..etc]. It's unfair to view these services as a singular function, you typically touch MANY features/products in production. The cost includes the convenience of offering everything under one roof, because, face it, doing everything by yourself at the SLAs provided by the giants is no trivial task. Unless you're a BIG company that likes to distract itself with infrastructure instead of building and sharpening the core offerings, chances are that you will NEVER really build anything as reliable, inter-operable, configurable and manageable at cost.

MichaelGG 9y ago
This is simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data. A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?
- mankash666 9y ago
  A good case study is Dropbox. They didn't build any of their own infrastructure until they became big enough (2 years ago).
  - Dobbs 9y ago
    Dropbox built their own infrastructure over five years ago. They just took several years to turn the infra from idle to being used.
  - Mahh 9y ago
    The fact here isn't quite right. (I'm an employee at Dropbox) Primarily, until 2 years ago we did lean on S3 for all block storage, but most of the rest of the infrastructure (metadata storage, etc) ran in our own datacenters. Your point I think you're getting at sounds like something I'd agree with though -- you can wait a bit the cost efficiency starts to be what is important/impactful to work on before shifting your usage away from some of these providers.
    - late2part 9y ago
      I heard a story once that Dropbox started to move their data out of S3 and AWS rate limited them so they couldn't. I don't know if it's true or not but I heard the story.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- sokoloff 9y ago
  About 2-3x. I'm a big fan of cloud computing in general (and AWS in particular as the clear leader, IMO) and helped lead our transition out of colos and into AWS, but the egress charges is the biggest area of AWS that I feel is egregiously over-priced. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to locate some of your very high egress services outside of AWS. I discourage that for casual optimization, but when you get to Netflix/20 scale, that makes sense to trifle with.
  - abalone 9y ago
    Speaking of Netflix: “The best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said.[1] [1] http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- xadhominemx 9y ago
  would a scale streaming customer really pay that much?
throw2016 9y ago
This comes off as a bit of a red herring. No one is denying the value of their other offerings. It's the cost of bandwidth which is clearly disproportionate. Let them charge for extra for the 'value adds', what is the justification for adding these costs to the bandwidth specifically? I think people raising the issue are just seeking more transparent pricing.
kmicklas 9y ago
This is definitely true but I think that possibly as the big cloud players devote more and more of their revenue towards developing all kinds of (vendor lockin) APIs each of which does not concern the average user, rather than generic and reliable infrastructure that benefits all users, the value proposition will get worse and worse.
WalterSear 9y ago
Considering my experience with google adwords service, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams providing these services were under heavy pressure to over-promise, under-deliver, and sneak in as many hidden charges as they possibly can.
- bike4beer 9y ago
  Very Evil is 'ad-words' when they first started it was ok but in the late 90's they started those ad-clicks all over the world, all of a sudden people in Nigeria were clicking your ad's for $1/click. Funny thing is every time Google added a new service you were opted in, until you turned it off, you didn't know there was a new service unless your monthly bill went up 10X, and went on like this for years. 99% of our biz was europe-usa, we had turned off all ad's outside those area's, but google kept creating new products and featuring our ad's all over Africa, where we had never shipped a product in our entire history. Finally simply quit using ad-words, gave up with their games. AWS is evil, Google is Evil. If you can't touch it, you don't own it; That includes your data. That includes your server's, that includes your pipe Google is NSA - Putin "Do no Evil" Amazon is CIA
slackingoff2017 9y ago
I disagree strongly with this. Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. I was around back when Apache and CGI was all there was, even then uptime was so good that it was rare to hit a website that was down. There's a lot of koolaid being thrown around by the companies with cloud to sell. Unfortunately these also happen to be the big "market leaders" so it's hard to deny what they're saying and get taken seriously. It's like six sigma, agile, or stack ranking. The big guys are doing it so it must be the right thing to do... Right? Until everyone realized it's mostly a ploy to make money selling books and conference tickets, or in this case rent out a bunch of excess capacity for huge profit. I disagree with reliability as well. Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. With the cloud you have to worry a lot more about fault tolerance whereas with dedicated equipment simple offline backups are often enough to meet any reasonable SLA.
- mbesto 9y ago
  > Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. Before all of these providers existed: 1) The volume of internet traffic that exists today didn't exist then. Mobile devices didn't exist. Mobile devices that aren't always connected to the internet and consume hours of our day didn't exist. Large downloads (1GB) didn't exist. They couldn't exist because the infrastructure that exists now can properly support it...at scale. 2) Websites that had large volumes of traffic had top tier expensive admins to maintain them (surprise surprise, Amazon did and turned it into a service) > Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. 3) What's your definition of "most"? Sources for those numbers please?
  - samstave 9y ago
    Yeah, well my BBS runs just fine over 2400 baud and 640kb ram. Ill see your ass in the Pit.
    - Clubber 9y ago
_jal 9y ago
> Disagree. There's no false advertising here I don't see any claims about false advertising. Just complaints about one aspect of the service being very overpriced. Sounds like you consider it worth it for your application, and that's great. But it is simply not priced appropriately for a lot of services, which naturally go elsewhere. It seems obvious to me that bandwidth is Azon's proxy measure for "utility". Lots of companies do this - Oracle uses core-count as a proxy for the "utility" you get from their software, for example. But like any proxy for a different variable, it is going to be wrong; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. And you hardly need to be a "BIG" company to choose something other than cloud hosting. My last two looked at and rejected them. Neither qualify as even medium-sized. Both are extremely cost-aware. Running our own data centers is cost-competitive at my current gig and was much, much cheaper at the last, which was very bandwidth-heavy.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  If every cloud service arguably overprices one essential part of delivery, bandwidth usage in this case, my instinct (no more, no less and no pretension to analysis) is that there's a design intent to ensure a difficult to price component of the service provision is paid for. I'm merely speculating, but if you have a idea what is the possible difficult to price component, can anyone help with any suggestions? Edit to suggest a similitude: my job is to help people understand the price of (print) advertising. This is often intractable. To a certain extent, a good deal of people involved just throw costs into commission rates and other factors that make understanding the price models difficult and sometimes completely opaque. Is it impossible to imagine that the cost of cloud bandwidth is nothing less innocent than "put our non itemized expenses here'?
noahl 9y ago
This is true, but I think there's another point that's even more significant: not all network access is the same. In particular, putting some machines in a rack in a colo and connecting to the nearest Internet exchange is really not comparable to Google's networking, which is essentially a worldwide second Internet that is faster and more reliable than the normal Internet, and which carries your packets as far as possible towards their destination before dropping them off at a POP. (Note: I worked for Google until 3 days ago.)
- Xorlev 9y ago
  Can't agree more. I balked at the cost (still sort of do as a GCP user) until I joined Google and was able to peek behind the curtain. The network quality is absurd. GCP customers pay a premium for having the same network reach as Google. Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible. Not only that, but Google's datacenters have 24/7 attention, lots of redundant providers, etc.. A bargain basement colo won't be nearly as reliable.
  - noahl 9y ago
    Yes, you're right, and you mentioned something else that I forgot to. A lot of people here are comparing Big 3 network costs to the cost of hiring a single network administrator. The correct comparison is to the cost of hiring a team big enough to staff a 24-hour on call rotation with a 5 minute response time SLA.
  - lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y ago
    The OP has no fucking clue on this topic. If the goal is to get the cheapest bandwidth possible, by all means... I stopped reading after seeing Google Fiber in the comparison.....
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    >Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible. The benefit of this has can't be understated. In SE Asia connecting to their Taiwan region from most places I'm literally just at the mercy of a few local hops at level 3 due to their extensive remote peering. Staying on the Google network is also interesting to observe when connecting between Google Compute data centers. AWS and Azure behave considerably different.

MichaelGG 9y ago

This is simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data. A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?

mankash666 9y ago
A good case study is Dropbox. They didn't build any of their own infrastructure until they became big enough (2 years ago).
- Dobbs 9y ago
  Dropbox built their own infrastructure over five years ago. They just took several years to turn the infra from idle to being used.
- Mahh 9y ago
  The fact here isn't quite right. (I'm an employee at Dropbox) Primarily, until 2 years ago we did lean on S3 for all block storage, but most of the rest of the infrastructure (metadata storage, etc) ran in our own datacenters. Your point I think you're getting at sounds like something I'd agree with though -- you can wait a bit the cost efficiency starts to be what is important/impactful to work on before shifting your usage away from some of these providers.
  - late2part 9y ago
    I heard a story once that Dropbox started to move their data out of S3 and AWS rate limited them so they couldn't. I don't know if it's true or not but I heard the story.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sokoloff 9y ago
About 2-3x. I'm a big fan of cloud computing in general (and AWS in particular as the clear leader, IMO) and helped lead our transition out of colos and into AWS, but the egress charges is the biggest area of AWS that I feel is egregiously over-priced. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to locate some of your very high egress services outside of AWS. I discourage that for casual optimization, but when you get to Netflix/20 scale, that makes sense to trifle with.
- abalone 9y ago
  Speaking of Netflix: “The best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said.[1] [1] http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
xadhominemx 9y ago
would a scale streaming customer really pay that much?

throw2016 9y ago

This comes off as a bit of a red herring. No one is denying the value of their other offerings. It's the cost of bandwidth which is clearly disproportionate. Let them charge for extra for the 'value adds', what is the justification for adding these costs to the bandwidth specifically? I think people raising the issue are just seeking more transparent pricing.

kmicklas 9y ago

This is definitely true but I think that possibly as the big cloud players devote more and more of their revenue towards developing all kinds of (vendor lockin) APIs each of which does not concern the average user, rather than generic and reliable infrastructure that benefits all users, the value proposition will get worse and worse.

WalterSear 9y ago

Considering my experience with google adwords service, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams providing these services were under heavy pressure to over-promise, under-deliver, and sneak in as many hidden charges as they possibly can.

bike4beer 9y ago
Very Evil is 'ad-words' when they first started it was ok but in the late 90's they started those ad-clicks all over the world, all of a sudden people in Nigeria were clicking your ad's for $1/click. Funny thing is every time Google added a new service you were opted in, until you turned it off, you didn't know there was a new service unless your monthly bill went up 10X, and went on like this for years. 99% of our biz was europe-usa, we had turned off all ad's outside those area's, but google kept creating new products and featuring our ad's all over Africa, where we had never shipped a product in our entire history. Finally simply quit using ad-words, gave up with their games. AWS is evil, Google is Evil. If you can't touch it, you don't own it; That includes your data. That includes your server's, that includes your pipe Google is NSA - Putin "Do no Evil" Amazon is CIA

slackingoff2017 9y ago

I disagree strongly with this. Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. I was around back when Apache and CGI was all there was, even then uptime was so good that it was rare to hit a website that was down. There's a lot of koolaid being thrown around by the companies with cloud to sell. Unfortunately these also happen to be the big "market leaders" so it's hard to deny what they're saying and get taken seriously. It's like six sigma, agile, or stack ranking. The big guys are doing it so it must be the right thing to do... Right? Until everyone realized it's mostly a ploy to make money selling books and conference tickets, or in this case rent out a bunch of excess capacity for huge profit. I disagree with reliability as well. Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. With the cloud you have to worry a lot more about fault tolerance whereas with dedicated equipment simple offline backups are often enough to meet any reasonable SLA.

mbesto 9y ago
> Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. Before all of these providers existed: 1) The volume of internet traffic that exists today didn't exist then. Mobile devices didn't exist. Mobile devices that aren't always connected to the internet and consume hours of our day didn't exist. Large downloads (1GB) didn't exist. They couldn't exist because the infrastructure that exists now can properly support it...at scale. 2) Websites that had large volumes of traffic had top tier expensive admins to maintain them (surprise surprise, Amazon did and turned it into a service) > Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. 3) What's your definition of "most"? Sources for those numbers please?
- samstave 9y ago
  Yeah, well my BBS runs just fine over 2400 baud and 640kb ram. Ill see your ass in the Pit.
  - Clubber 9y ago

_jal 9y ago

> Disagree. There's no false advertising here I don't see any claims about false advertising. Just complaints about one aspect of the service being very overpriced. Sounds like you consider it worth it for your application, and that's great. But it is simply not priced appropriately for a lot of services, which naturally go elsewhere. It seems obvious to me that bandwidth is Azon's proxy measure for "utility". Lots of companies do this - Oracle uses core-count as a proxy for the "utility" you get from their software, for example. But like any proxy for a different variable, it is going to be wrong; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. And you hardly need to be a "BIG" company to choose something other than cloud hosting. My last two looked at and rejected them. Neither qualify as even medium-sized. Both are extremely cost-aware. Running our own data centers is cost-competitive at my current gig and was much, much cheaper at the last, which was very bandwidth-heavy.

amygdyl 9y ago
If every cloud service arguably overprices one essential part of delivery, bandwidth usage in this case, my instinct (no more, no less and no pretension to analysis) is that there's a design intent to ensure a difficult to price component of the service provision is paid for. I'm merely speculating, but if you have a idea what is the possible difficult to price component, can anyone help with any suggestions? Edit to suggest a similitude: my job is to help people understand the price of (print) advertising. This is often intractable. To a certain extent, a good deal of people involved just throw costs into commission rates and other factors that make understanding the price models difficult and sometimes completely opaque. Is it impossible to imagine that the cost of cloud bandwidth is nothing less innocent than "put our non itemized expenses here'?

noahl 9y ago

This is true, but I think there's another point that's even more significant: not all network access is the same. In particular, putting some machines in a rack in a colo and connecting to the nearest Internet exchange is really not comparable to Google's networking, which is essentially a worldwide second Internet that is faster and more reliable than the normal Internet, and which carries your packets as far as possible towards their destination before dropping them off at a POP. (Note: I worked for Google until 3 days ago.)

Xorlev 9y ago
Can't agree more. I balked at the cost (still sort of do as a GCP user) until I joined Google and was able to peek behind the curtain. The network quality is absurd. GCP customers pay a premium for having the same network reach as Google. Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible. Not only that, but Google's datacenters have 24/7 attention, lots of redundant providers, etc.. A bargain basement colo won't be nearly as reliable.
- noahl 9y ago
  Yes, you're right, and you mentioned something else that I forgot to. A lot of people here are comparing Big 3 network costs to the cost of hiring a single network administrator. The correct comparison is to the cost of hiring a team big enough to staff a 24-hour on call rotation with a 5 minute response time SLA.
- lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y ago
  The OP has no fucking clue on this topic. If the goal is to get the cheapest bandwidth possible, by all means... I stopped reading after seeing Google Fiber in the comparison.....
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  >Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible. The benefit of this has can't be understated. In SE Asia connecting to their Taiwan region from most places I'm literally just at the mercy of a few local hops at level 3 due to their extensive remote peering. Staying on the Google network is also interesting to observe when connecting between Google Compute data centers. AWS and Azure behave considerably different.