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A long standing complaint of mine is that Cloud egress pricing severely limits the usefulness of compute. If I want to say process some visual effects on a larg
by _7iun 9y ago
A long standing complaint of mine is that Cloud egress pricing severely limits the usefulness of compute. If I want to say process some visual effects on a large (1TB) ProRes video, I might spend $1 on the compute but $100 on the egress getting it back.
Unfortunately these changes don't really resolve that problem. "Standard" pricing is a paltry 20% less. That 1TB video egress still costs $80 and for that price I can rent a beefy server with a dedicated gigabit pipe for a month.
Why is "Cloud" bandwidth so damned expensive?
I'd love a "best effort" or "off peak" tier. I imagine Google's pipes are pretty empty when NA is asleep and my batch jobs aren't really going to care.
- deafcalculus 9y agoThe high bandwidth price is mostly to drive away seedboxes and porn sites. Huge discounts are likely available to big customers.
- nik736 9y agoThey could simply ban adult websites in their ToS, I doubt this is the reason. Also seed boxes are nowhere near useful if you still would pay $10 / TB and at the same time can get traffic for free at OVH or Online/Scaleway. It's most likely vendor lock-in and people are dumb enough to pay for it.
- adventured 9y agoThe reason, is that bandwidth is a solid profit center for the cloud majors. Amazon initiated it, the rest are going along in cartel fashion, nobody wants to disrupt one of the lucrative angles by driving that profit center toward zero. There's no other rational explanation why Azure or Google aren't hammering AWS on bandwidth cost as a competitive angle. They're basically conspiring in the industrial sense, no different than airlines that somehow magically agree to simultaneously raise prices or department stores that for decades all agreed not to discount the perfume etc. box section of their stores.
- btown 9y agoNo need for conspiracy theories. When one market participant anchors a price at a high premium, you don't need to collude to know that undercutting them is a scorched earth strategy that causes both of you to lose. Part of this is because financial markets value your revenue more than market share, and undercutting bandwidth pricing hurts the former more than it helps the latter.
- jpalomaki 9y agoHigh bandwidth costs also make it more costly to move some of the data processing to companies which offer very cheap dedicated servers. -- But it's not fair to say that price from Google is high just because some random hosting company gives you unmetered 500mbs for $99/month. As we have seen with many unlimited cloud storage offerings, some companies do unsustainable offers to attract customers. There are different strategies behind this. Some just count on that majority of customers won't use everything they could. Others know the price hike is inevitable, but believe customers will still stuck.
- regularfry 9y agoToS means they have to police it. High prices police themselves.
- stormbeard 9y agoIt's expensive to pull data out of their cloud partly because it makes switching providers or moving on-premise less appealing. It's a trap.
- user5994461 9y ago>>> ... costs $80 and for that price I can rent a beefy server with a dedicated gigabit pipe for a month. No you can't. One doesn't get dedicated gigabit for that price.
- nik736 9y agoThat's true, even the cheapest carriers (cogent/he) charge around $0,15 per mbps and only if you commit to over 10 gbps or more.
- Veratyr 9y agoAh, sorry. I meant "beefy dedicated server with a gigabit pipe". It's the server that's dedicated, not the pipe.
- sipjca 9y agoWhat? It is definitely possible to rent dedicated servers for that price with an un-metered gigabit pipe. With 2 minutes of looking on webhostingtalk I found: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1667849 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1667849 Sure it's a no name provider, but you can get an Intel E3 for $80 with a "Guaranteed 700 Mb/s" pipe. Edit: Clearly I misread the original quote given the OP response
- rb808 9y agoI was going to back up my photos to AWS Glacier before noticing that retrieval costs are multiple times the storage cost. I guess that is possibly OK for a backup but scared me into a physical alternative. http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/
- vgt 9y agoCheck out Google's Coldline https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival/
- yeahokwhatever 9y agoGoogle Glacier, aka G2. I checked it out. I like that I don't have to do calculus to understand how I'll be billed, or write my own retrieval software.
- vgt 9y agoAlso nice to have sub-millisecond latency to first byte (versus multi-hour) and performance characteristics of normal GCS.. so you could run a rare MapReduce job on it just the same as regular GCS :)
- Johnny555 9y agoAWS has greatly simplified their Glacier pricing from the inscrutable transfer rate pricing to more common sense latency based pricing. If you want your data back in < 5 minutes it's $0.03/GB, 3 - 5 hours, $0.01/GB, 5 - 12 hours, $0.0025/GB AWS Glacier is cheaper per month than Google ColdStorage, but Google doesn't charge more for faster access to your data. So maybe you still need that Calculus to figure out which is a better deal for your data access pattern.
- ValentineC 9y agoThis does not include standard AWS egress pricing, which is something like $92/TB.
- all_blue_chucks 9y agoEncrypt it then egress using a CDN.
- Veratyr 9y agoIt's not really cheaper: https://cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing https://cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing Cache egress is about the same price as the "Standard" tier but you have to pay the $0.04/GB cache fill price as well. The only real potential discount is Direct Peering or Interconnect, which can get it down to $0.04/GB. That's still $40/TB though.
- Analemma_ 9y ago> Why is "Cloud" bandwidth so damned expensive? Because compute is the loss leader to get you in the door. The bandwidth is where they make their money.
- captainmuon 9y agoI wonder what that same 1 TB of data costs on the "open market" (or how it is even priced). Say I'm a smallish ISP on the east coast and want to send 1 TB to another smallish ISP on the west coast. I probably have a contract with, I don't know, AT&T or whoever owns the cables (I'm from Europe so I have no clue, in Germany it would be Telekom). I'm guessing it would probably cost cents (and that would bring my data across the continent, not just out Google's door)? Definitely nowhere near $80.
- wmf 9y ago1 TB = $35. https://www.packetfabric.com/pricing/ https://www.packetfabric.com/pricing/
- jlg23 9y agoIntentionally not linking to any of the companies I found with just a quick search at google (mislaid the PDF for carrier 2 carrier pricing of a major provider): 40E/month for 30TB traffic, 1G uplink (1G/s guaranteed), 2x500G SSD on a i7.
- Veratyr 9y agoYou don't buy bytes, you buy pipes. Typically, you buy say 1Gbit of transit and you can put as much or as little data through that pipe as you want. You can get a gigabit pipe from Hurricane Electric or FDCServers for $400/month. In a month it can take 327TB of data, so the cost of 1TB is ~$1.20.
- DisposableMike 9y agoCurious - at what POP have you been quoted $400/month for a gigabit connection from HE?
- posguy 9y agoIts not a quote, but a well known, long running cabinet special for 42u (aka a dedicated full rack) and 15 amps of power: https://he.net/special.pdf https://he.net/special.pdf Other datacenters can go cheaper if you need less rackspace and power, bandwidth is cheap!
- hueving 9y ago>Why is "Cloud" bandwidth so damned expensive? This is one of the easiest ways for cloud providers to make money. I very often see people doing lots of advanced calculations for compute and choosing providers based on that without really thinking about bandwidth usage. Famous last words, "Oh, it's a web service so bandwidth shouldn't be a big deal."
- illumin8 9y agoSave your outputs in the cloud. There is zero cost to access S3 object storage from EC2. Its only if you insist on pulling down 1TB files to your local workstation that you run into this. This seems like a self-inflicted problem.
- _7iun 9y agoThe problem is often I need that data locally. With video editing in particular, I can't work with data that's not local and I can't run my editing software in the cloud because I'm not aware of any kind of remote workstation that offers colour management and whatnot.
- boulos 9y agoTeradici does do this. Feel free to send me an email :). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- Veratyr 9y agoAre you aware of anything else that does this? I'm an individual so nothing with "Contact Sales" is useful to me.
- boulos 9y agoI didn't say to Contact Sales, I said to contact me :). Remote desktop with super accurate color instead of lots of dithering and compression is tricky. Are you on Windows or Linux?
- Veratyr 9y agoAh, I see. The software I need (mostly Davinci Resolve) runs on all major platforms, including Linux, so I can be on whatever I need to be.
- arthurcolle 9y agoWhat is egress in this context? What is ProRes? Just curious
- packetslave 9y agoif only there were some way to find detailed information to satisfy your curiosity using the Internet. some kind of "searching engine", perhaps.
- krallja 9y agoWikipedia: "Apple ProRes is a lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports up to 8K." Egress and ingress are outgoing and incoming data, respectively.
- outworlder 9y agoWhat about BackBlaze's B2? It's priced much lower.
- sitepodmatt 9y agoI think part of the reason is people look at Linode/Vultr/DO and presume that 1/2TB for $5 is the market price (and then quote HE.Net/Cogent/Hibernia offering 10G to certain colos at $2-5kpm as backing proof), or dedicated servers with 10TB for $50pm etc... Linode/Vultr/DO mainly work off an average usage of 1%-2%, although at least they dont stop you deploying more boxes as you reach the limit, you can get clever and one would presume they dont invoke some TOS clause. I imagine GCP, AWS, and Azure bandwidth cost is closer to the truth at running a network that is resilent and can scale beyond 100G, the transit or costs of fiber is probably only a tiny fraction when pushing beyond 100G per region, vs your low end VPS provider, let's not forget the epic fail of Linode DDOS handling. I do agree though in comparison it sounds expensive.
- HappyTypist 9y agoNo, I can assure you that Linode, OVH, DO are making money per G at 1TB per $5. Cloud providers are expensive because they want vendor lock in. They want to make it artificially cheaper to use their own services (elasticsearch, etc) over something else. And they want a high switchover cost when you want to transfer all of your data to another provider.
- a-none-i-mouse 9y ago"I imagine Google's pipes are pretty empty when NA is asleep and my batch jobs aren't really going to care." You are aware that Google is a Global Company, with users all over the 'globe' yes? That not all "people" (or "users") are in: "NA"... right?