8 ms·

I assume the 200PB of storage and 60Gbps egress bandwidth 24/365 they do would be _extremely_ pricy on AWS...

charcircuit 6y ago
I have no clue how people can afford what AWS charges for bandwidth. I did the math once for migrating a project to AWS and the bandwidth alone costed 10x my entire current infrastructure for that project, which is something I run for free.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  For lots of orgs I’ve seen it creeps up slowly until you’re paying 10-50x of full transit without any peers but by that point you’re too locked in to do anything
- remus 6y ago
  Depends on whether bandwidth is important to what you're doing. In many applications it isn't so even at the inflated prices charged by AWS et al don't really matter in the context of other expenses.
- polote 6y ago
  Because people have nothing to compare their AWS cost to. They don't know how much it would cost them to host their service outside of AWS. And it is not only a cost comparison. You need different kind of people to manage in-house vs cloud, not that you need less or more, just different skills
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    Not only that: It is really hard to predict AWS cost. So many variables go in. And starting with a small side project in AWS is easy, and then each additional step is a small step ...
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    Absolutely - AWS is this generation's IBM, no one was ever fired for buying services from them, so to speak.
walrus01 6y ago
On the scale of big hosting operations, 60Gbps outbound is not that much. If you're buying full tables IP transit from major carriers at IX points, I've seen 10GbE for $700-900/mo, and 100GbE circuits for under $7k/month. Of course you wouldn't want to have just one transit, but I'm fairly sure if somebody said to me 'here's $20,000 a month to buy transit', on the west coast, it's within the realm of possible. Ideally of course they should be able to meet a fairly wide number of downstream eyeball ISPs at the major IX points in the bay area and offload a lot of traffic with settlement-free peering. 60Gbps outbound from AWS, Azure or GCP would be astronomically incredibly expensive.
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  It seems that companies can be too big for the cloud and too small for the cloud (don't need k8s). I wonder what's the sweet spot.
  - 867-5309 6y ago
    horizontal and vertical scaling are the latest push, but diagonal would be the sweet spot
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  IME with cloud in the small and in the large: network prices are artificially high on the cloud providers and are very easy to get discounted if you are a big spender.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    So the small pay for the large?
    - jeromegv 6y ago
      Yes, that's typically how it works for any industry. You get discount on bulk orders.
- 6y ago
tutfbhuf 6y ago
A hybrid solution might be possible. Put your core infra on AWS, but get a very cheap CDN (or custom solution) in front of it to handle the 60Gbps so that only a small fraction will hit your AWS infra. Do the same for storage, e.g. build your own ceph cluster on bare-metal instead of Amazon S3.
Sebb767 6y ago
To be fair here, when you're pouring that much money into AWS you probably have a better contract and can negotiate the price down quite a bit. Additionally, you could use CloudFront to further reduce your bandwidth costs. That's not to say that it wouldn't be incredibly expensive, but probably far less than what you see on the pricing page.

I have no clue how people can afford what AWS charges for bandwidth. I did the math once for migrating a project to AWS and the bandwidth alone costed 10x my entire current infrastructure for that project, which is something I run for free.

dilyevsky 6y ago
For lots of orgs I’ve seen it creeps up slowly until you’re paying 10-50x of full transit without any peers but by that point you’re too locked in to do anything
remus 6y ago
Depends on whether bandwidth is important to what you're doing. In many applications it isn't so even at the inflated prices charged by AWS et al don't really matter in the context of other expenses.
polote 6y ago
Because people have nothing to compare their AWS cost to. They don't know how much it would cost them to host their service outside of AWS. And it is not only a cost comparison. You need different kind of people to manage in-house vs cloud, not that you need less or more, just different skills
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Not only that: It is really hard to predict AWS cost. So many variables go in. And starting with a small side project in AWS is easy, and then each additional step is a small step ...
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Absolutely - AWS is this generation's IBM, no one was ever fired for buying services from them, so to speak.

walrus01 6y ago

On the scale of big hosting operations, 60Gbps outbound is not that much. If you're buying full tables IP transit from major carriers at IX points, I've seen 10GbE for $700-900/mo, and 100GbE circuits for under $7k/month. Of course you wouldn't want to have just one transit, but I'm fairly sure if somebody said to me 'here's $20,000 a month to buy transit', on the west coast, it's within the realm of possible. Ideally of course they should be able to meet a fairly wide number of downstream eyeball ISPs at the major IX points in the bay area and offload a lot of traffic with settlement-free peering. 60Gbps outbound from AWS, Azure or GCP would be astronomically incredibly expensive.

tutfbhuf 6y ago
It seems that companies can be too big for the cloud and too small for the cloud (don't need k8s). I wonder what's the sweet spot.
- 867-5309 6y ago
  horizontal and vertical scaling are the latest push, but diagonal would be the sweet spot
owenmarshall 6y ago
IME with cloud in the small and in the large: network prices are artificially high on the cloud providers and are very easy to get discounted if you are a big spender.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  So the small pay for the large?
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    Yes, that's typically how it works for any industry. You get discount on bulk orders.
6y ago

tutfbhuf 6y ago

A hybrid solution might be possible. Put your core infra on AWS, but get a very cheap CDN (or custom solution) in front of it to handle the 60Gbps so that only a small fraction will hit your AWS infra. Do the same for storage, e.g. build your own ceph cluster on bare-metal instead of Amazon S3.

Sebb767 6y ago

To be fair here, when you're pouring that much money into AWS you probably have a better contract and can negotiate the price down quite a bit. Additionally, you could use CloudFront to further reduce your bandwidth costs. That's not to say that it wouldn't be incredibly expensive, but probably far less than what you see on the pricing page.