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500GB/mo. presumably per IP address for anonymous pulls. Amazon have absolutely no problem revealing the true cost of egress when it suits them. Also, "500GB/mo

500GB/mo. presumably per IP address for anonymous pulls. Amazon have absolutely no problem revealing the true cost of egress when it suits them. Also, "500GB/mo.", at launch. Let's not forget those generous free limits can be slashed whenever it suits, and why they might be so generous for launch at all. Don't be mistaken, actually using this for public images is falling for another "data gravity" marketing gimmick. So they attract enough public images that some folk find one or more of their services absolutely must pull from AWS, pushing their corporate NAT address over the 41GB/day limit. Now your "free" hosting has become a reason for that company to start paying ~$45/month to AWS in egress fees just to use your images, and perhaps with a new ticket in the backlog to consider simply moving the cluster to AWS. "But it'll always be like that regardless of provider", not necessarily. The reason that Docker registry consumes a ridiculous amount of bandwidth is largely an architectural issue, both in the software and the design of the client's network. Perhaps a better direction is addressing this immense waste of networking rather than turning it into another free marketing opportunity for a near-monopolistic cloud

toomuchtodo 6y ago
For commercial use, $45/month is a low enough cost to be noise for many businesses (even though the bandwidth transfer markup is eye watering). If it’s breaking your budget, you can always pull and then push to another registry (it’s just tarballs after all) or build new images from scratch with your Dockerfiles. Open source projects and similar cost sensitive use cases might consider https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr Docker Hub is similar to Youtube in the sense that it’s a whole lot of bandwidth and storage used and someone has to pay for it. Could you run your own? Time is expensive. Don’t unless you absolutely have to.
- ralph87 6y ago
  $45/mo would be the minimum payment, assuming the free limit announced today actually lasted. Let's say they begin crying 12 months from now and knock it down even by 50%, now you're looking at $810 minimum per year per client site. Multiply that up by, say, 1000 sites, and you're starting to look at a "free" service that might completely pay for its own development within a year or two.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    That has historically not been the direction AWS prices go, but as I mention in my other comment, it’s trivial to move if AWS tries to put you over a barrel. Object storage is a commodity, and Docker images are objects, so shrug. It would be cool if Cloudflare supported container registry primitives backed by user provided Backblaze B2 bucket config info, for example (maybe you can do this with workers?). Properly parameterize your build/CI scripts (in this case, your container registry host and how to auth against it) for portability. Portability is your insurance against poor service provider behavior.
  - mariusmarais 6y ago
    This sounds more like the Oracle model than AWS. Or exactly what Docker just did if you squint a bit. In which case, just move.
  - jamesfe 6y ago
    Sure, but say your engineers cost you $100/hr, and every hour beyond 2,000hrs per year they work, they become more unhappy. I think it's worth spending the 8 hours/yr/site, supposing you have relatively few sites. Plus, your engineers for 1hr/month will never achieve the same SLAs that AMZN will. For smallish numbers of sites, it seems like the AMZN solution is fine. For bigger ones, there is always enterprise pricing :-)
- temp667 6y ago
  Does AWS raise prices like this (I know Oracle does - OUCH). I've yet to be hit by one of these price increases and have been on AWS since the beginning. Until I migrated they supported my SimpleDB app FOREVER (I mean, it wasn't even on website at one point but the calls still worked!). A small part of AWS success must be because of this confidence they will stick around, keep a service running.
tidepod12 6y ago
This entire post is just unnecessary fear-mongering. >Also, "500GB/mo.", at launch. Let's not forget those generous free limits can be slashed whenever it suits, and why they might be so generous for launch at all. AWS has, to my knowledge, never increased the cost of any service after launch. They do, however, have a long history of reducing prices. You also completely neglected to mention this part: >Simply authenticating with an AWS account increases free data bandwidth up to 5 TB each month when pulling images from the internet. And finally, workloads running in AWS will get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling publicly shared images hosted on AWS. So yes, AWS gives some incentive to create an AWS account, and an even further incentive to use AWS services. All I can say to that is... duh?
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  The problem is not that they give incentives. It's why they give incentives. Why do they want marketshare? It's simple, they're a business, they want to milk you for money. And like their forebears they understand well that the more they lock you into their solutions the more likely you are to keep paying for money even when you're mad at them for something they inevitably do that you don't agree with.
  - tidepod12 6y ago
    Oh the horror of a business that wants to make money off of the services they are offering! Do you work for a company that just gives away all of their services and products for free, or...?
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      You're a funny guy. Nothing is wrong with a business making money. What's wrong with Amazon is that they're going to make extra money through extortionate business practices and you're going to be shit out of luck looking for an alternative after they crush all of their competitors in ways that are not healthy to a functioning market.
renewiltord 6y ago
Switching Docker registries is kind of really easy so I wouldn't sweat it.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
For what it’s worth I’m not aware of AWS ever slashing a free tier or increasing pricing, though they do so much that I definitely could have missed something. Does anyone know of any examples particularly of them slashing a free tier later?
tpetry 6y ago
Everyone is beating him for his incorrect predictions about AWS pricing changes. But nobody focuses on the most important point: Somehow AWS can give you a lot of egress traffic for free, something _you_ would pay a lot of money for. This is clearly showing that egress pricing is heavily inflated so every cloud can print a lot of money.
- jfim 6y ago
  Egress pricing is there for another reason as well. It's meant to make it hard to move out of AWS. If one looks at the pricing for AWS Snowball [0], their bulk data transfer device, there's no per gigabyte cost to get data into AWS, but $0.03/GB to get data out. I'm pretty sure the bits are just as heavy coming into AWS as they are coming out. :-) [0] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/
  - oblio 6y ago
    I think it's also a convenient way to get rid of piracy and garbage content. You can't host MegaFileShare on AWS because it would cost too much and AWS doesn't have to bother about useless legal discussions since your value to them as a customer is really low for this use case.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Not necessarily. When bandwidth balances you can get peering agreements, but AWS will be very server heavy. Moving data in would just improve their ratios and help them reduce their own costs, so, it makes sense to make it free.
moritonal 6y ago
In regards to "But it'll always be like that regardless of provider", it's worth noting that distributed file-systems are situated perfectly to provide a torrent-like way of downloading containers. Self-blog just because it's easily at hand: https://blog.bonner.is/docker-registry-for-ipfs/ https://blog.bonner.is/docker-registry-for-ipfs/
marcinzm 6y ago
Unlike other companies AWS understands how to keep customers and maintain good will. They start with moderate prices and then decrease them as they better understand the market. Never increase them. You won't see the same great initial deals from AWS as other providers (ie: Google Kubernetes) but you can be certain your deal won't go away.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

For commercial use, $45/month is a low enough cost to be noise for many businesses (even though the bandwidth transfer markup is eye watering). If it’s breaking your budget, you can always pull and then push to another registry (it’s just tarballs after all) or build new images from scratch with your Dockerfiles. Open source projects and similar cost sensitive use cases might consider https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr Docker Hub is similar to Youtube in the sense that it’s a whole lot of bandwidth and storage used and someone has to pay for it. Could you run your own? Time is expensive. Don’t unless you absolutely have to.

ralph87 6y ago
$45/mo would be the minimum payment, assuming the free limit announced today actually lasted. Let's say they begin crying 12 months from now and knock it down even by 50%, now you're looking at $810 minimum per year per client site. Multiply that up by, say, 1000 sites, and you're starting to look at a "free" service that might completely pay for its own development within a year or two.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  That has historically not been the direction AWS prices go, but as I mention in my other comment, it’s trivial to move if AWS tries to put you over a barrel. Object storage is a commodity, and Docker images are objects, so shrug. It would be cool if Cloudflare supported container registry primitives backed by user provided Backblaze B2 bucket config info, for example (maybe you can do this with workers?). Properly parameterize your build/CI scripts (in this case, your container registry host and how to auth against it) for portability. Portability is your insurance against poor service provider behavior.
- mariusmarais 6y ago
  This sounds more like the Oracle model than AWS. Or exactly what Docker just did if you squint a bit. In which case, just move.
- jamesfe 6y ago
  Sure, but say your engineers cost you $100/hr, and every hour beyond 2,000hrs per year they work, they become more unhappy. I think it's worth spending the 8 hours/yr/site, supposing you have relatively few sites. Plus, your engineers for 1hr/month will never achieve the same SLAs that AMZN will. For smallish numbers of sites, it seems like the AMZN solution is fine. For bigger ones, there is always enterprise pricing :-)
temp667 6y ago
Does AWS raise prices like this (I know Oracle does - OUCH). I've yet to be hit by one of these price increases and have been on AWS since the beginning. Until I migrated they supported my SimpleDB app FOREVER (I mean, it wasn't even on website at one point but the calls still worked!). A small part of AWS success must be because of this confidence they will stick around, keep a service running.

tidepod12 6y ago

This entire post is just unnecessary fear-mongering. >Also, "500GB/mo.", at launch. Let's not forget those generous free limits can be slashed whenever it suits, and why they might be so generous for launch at all. AWS has, to my knowledge, never increased the cost of any service after launch. They do, however, have a long history of reducing prices. You also completely neglected to mention this part: >Simply authenticating with an AWS account increases free data bandwidth up to 5 TB each month when pulling images from the internet. And finally, workloads running in AWS will get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling publicly shared images hosted on AWS. So yes, AWS gives some incentive to create an AWS account, and an even further incentive to use AWS services. All I can say to that is... duh?

ethanwillis 6y ago
The problem is not that they give incentives. It's why they give incentives. Why do they want marketshare? It's simple, they're a business, they want to milk you for money. And like their forebears they understand well that the more they lock you into their solutions the more likely you are to keep paying for money even when you're mad at them for something they inevitably do that you don't agree with.
- tidepod12 6y ago
  Oh the horror of a business that wants to make money off of the services they are offering! Do you work for a company that just gives away all of their services and products for free, or...?
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    You're a funny guy. Nothing is wrong with a business making money. What's wrong with Amazon is that they're going to make extra money through extortionate business practices and you're going to be shit out of luck looking for an alternative after they crush all of their competitors in ways that are not healthy to a functioning market.

renewiltord 6y ago

Switching Docker registries is kind of really easy so I wouldn't sweat it.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

For what it’s worth I’m not aware of AWS ever slashing a free tier or increasing pricing, though they do so much that I definitely could have missed something. Does anyone know of any examples particularly of them slashing a free tier later?

tpetry 6y ago

Everyone is beating him for his incorrect predictions about AWS pricing changes. But nobody focuses on the most important point: Somehow AWS can give you a lot of egress traffic for free, something _you_ would pay a lot of money for. This is clearly showing that egress pricing is heavily inflated so every cloud can print a lot of money.

jfim 6y ago
Egress pricing is there for another reason as well. It's meant to make it hard to move out of AWS. If one looks at the pricing for AWS Snowball [0], their bulk data transfer device, there's no per gigabyte cost to get data into AWS, but $0.03/GB to get data out. I'm pretty sure the bits are just as heavy coming into AWS as they are coming out. :-) [0] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/
- oblio 6y ago
  I think it's also a convenient way to get rid of piracy and garbage content. You can't host MegaFileShare on AWS because it would cost too much and AWS doesn't have to bother about useless legal discussions since your value to them as a customer is really low for this use case.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Not necessarily. When bandwidth balances you can get peering agreements, but AWS will be very server heavy. Moving data in would just improve their ratios and help them reduce their own costs, so, it makes sense to make it free.

moritonal 6y ago

In regards to "But it'll always be like that regardless of provider", it's worth noting that distributed file-systems are situated perfectly to provide a torrent-like way of downloading containers. Self-blog just because it's easily at hand: https://blog.bonner.is/docker-registry-for-ipfs/ https://blog.bonner.is/docker-registry-for-ipfs/

marcinzm 6y ago

Unlike other companies AWS understands how to keep customers and maintain good will. They start with moderate prices and then decrease them as they better understand the market. Never increase them. You won't see the same great initial deals from AWS as other providers (ie: Google Kubernetes) but you can be certain your deal won't go away.