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AWS price reduction for data transfers out to the internet
- zozbot234 5y agoFree data egress out of AWS is a fairly big deal, since egress costs were formerly the main bottleneck which made using AWS impractical for all sorts of heavy compute/number crunching. It will be very interesting to see how these scenarios are affected.
- rvz 5y agoIs this a Cloudflare sell signal?
- encryptluks2 5y agoCloudflare seems to provide free egress. Cloud providers like AWS have been overcharging for some time. This seems more like a minor correction on behalf of Amazon than a sell signal for Cloudflare.
- slownews45 5y agoIf you believe cloudflare egress is "free" I have a long list of "free" and "unlimited" services to sell you. Cloudflare simply doesn't share egress pricing.
- encryptluks2 5y agoSure, I'd love to hear about them. Cloudflare has yet to charge me for egress.
- yellow_lead 5y agoI would say no - this legitimizes them as competition. Otherwise, there'd be no reason for the change.
- dsizzle 5y agoAre there any other examples where an incumbent lowering prices in response to competition was a positive sign for the incumbent? I'm also trying to unpack "legitimize" to something more concrete... One possibility is that AWS's action is a signal of AWS customers' moving business to Cloudflare (that we wouldn't otherwise know about). Or perhaps it's simply AWS flinching and consequently customers perceive Cloudflare as more legitimate and move more business there?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slownews45 5y agoIssues with cloudflare 1) They do not have public egress pricing. That should be a red flag at this time. 2) They are currently LOSING a lot of money on their offerings - AWS makes a ton. That should be red flag #2.
- DevKoala 5y agoThey are doing R&D atm that’s where the investment is going. The Cloudflare TAM isn’t static, it keeps growing.
- viraptor 5y ago> They are currently LOSING a lot of money on their offerings This is not interesting without more context. If they lose money because their income is below costs, that's a problem. If they lose money because they have headroom and spend all of it on customer acquisition, that's an opposite of a problem.
- slownews45 5y agoProbably half R&D (no issues there), half sales and marketing. One thing - is their free service offering a sales and marketing expense or is that in cost of revenue. Last quarter they did 80M in sales costs (vs 40 in R&D and 28 in G&A). Sales costs were 50% of operating costs and close to 50% of revenue. Amazon has everything blended, but sales runs 7% of revenue.
- DevKoala 5y agoNothing further from that. This is the best AWS can scramble in the near term as they continue seeing a decreasing trend in customer acquisition rate for the sector in which Cloudflare is predating them.
- slownews45 5y agoCloudflare has $20M in revenue growth in last quarter. AWS had growth of $1.2B in last quarter? I think AWS is still hitting something like 30%+ revenue growth YoY even though they are already huge? With this size / scale, AWS should be able predate someone like cloudflare on base pricing. I do think cloudflare may be able to evolve their products faster given they aren't carrying around x billion of recurring revenue.
- DevKoala 5y agoI am unaware of the specific verticals in which AWS is increasing their revenue growth; maybe they don’t go head the to head with Cloudflare there. For AWS to predate on pricing against Cloudflare would imply reducing the pricing for all existing customers too and that would be a significant amount of money left in the table.
- xwdv 5y agoNo, the opposite actually. Cloudflare’s offering is still better, and AWS failed to come up with a good response to it. Make no mistake, if you are a company of any significance this discount is weak.
- putlake 5y agoThis is a great question, and I don't know if the answer is as clear cut as the "No" responses here suggest. With 1TB free, Cloudfront has now removed the incentive for AWS customers (those who use EC2 or S3) to adopt Cloudflare's free or even $20 tier. While Cloudflare doesn't make much money off these customers, it's how their network learned and grew. 1TB is more than enough for a lot of applications.
- plasma 5y agoThis isn’t a reduction at all? It’s introducing more free tier, but once you blow past that, the costs add up again.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoUnless I'm blind, it's not a price reduction, but free tier expansion.
- jacurtis 5y agoYes it is really just a free tier expansion. But many sites today would essentially be able to completely live under the free tier for the foreseeable future, who were previously paying for it. Which I guess makes it a price reduction. Even a company with 2Tb of egress traffic would now only pay for 1Tb instead of 1.95Tb. Which makes it nearly a 50% price reduction. So I guess... it depends how you look at it.
- newaccount74 5y agoAnd if you need 100TB of bandwidth it's a 1% discount. My guess is that the majority of their revenue is coming from a few big customers, for whom this is not a relevant discount at all. I thinkt that they are introducing this offer to get developers to adopt AWS for small projects, hoping that they'll then use the same service they are already familiar with for big projects.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago> the majority of their revenue is coming from a few big customers A very significant percentage of their revenue comes from Netlix, Heroku, and several others that run their entire infrastructure on AWS.
- EarlKing 5y agoNetflix does not run their entire infrastructure on AWS. Final delivery of content still comes from OpenConnect (their own CDN). IOW, they migrated all of their non-CDN functions to AWS, but content delivery is still handled by OpenConnect appliances installed at key peering points within ISP networks.
- 999900000999 5y ago
- gbmatt 5y agoGatekeepers of the internet, like Cloudfront and Cloudflare, grossly inhibit the ability of upstart search engines to compete with Google. They make it easy for the Google crawler but, by default, block the lesser known search engine crawlers, or make those crawlers less prominent in the user firewall controls. This should be protected somehow by law, some sort of equal rights for bots law. But, alas, it is not this way. It doesn't help that Google itself is a major investor in Cloudflare, either.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jsnell 5y agoDiscussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332207
- roca 5y agoThanks Cloudflare!
- top_post 5y agoThis right here.
- john37386 5y agoIt sounds like a nice move to start increasing competition on bandwidth out by cloud providers. Let's see if the market will follow. Indeed, it doesn't change much for big players, but it is a lower monthly/yearly bill for the startups and smaller players. Bandwidth out was always the small asterisk that most people forgot to estimate and/or read properly in the contract. Don't underestimate your bandwidth out from your cloud provider in your business plan. It can really go out of control quick.
- danols 5y agoI don't understand how it is possible in a functioning market economy to have 8000% markup on a utility product like bandwidth. Seems more like an oligopoly where a few big actors with a big moat has agreed to keep prices inflated. How can a sustained 8000% markup for a product like bandwidth not be considered price fixing? source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
- spoonjim 5y agoAWS is a luxury product and the outbound charge is the delivery fee. You will also find that the delivery fee for a Louis Vuitton bag is more than for a pizza.
- tw04 5y agoAWS spent the first decade of existence advertising to executives as a way to significantly decrease their cost of IT, not as the Louis Vuitton of IT.
- jollybean 5y agoNo, it's a very valuable tool for corporate IT. The egress is a way to snare a lot of extra margin. It's 100% clear that orgs. wanting to host large public platforms will have 'major concerns' over this pricing issue but that's not their target market. I'll bet most HNeers are thinking in terms of 'Hosting my App' there vs. AWS Bread and Butter is mostly hosting corporate IT services, which is a different thing.
- Aeolun 5y agoThey started feeling the squeeze from Cloudflare weren’t they?
- numair 5y agoA friendly reminder that, if you don’t like Amazon’s ethics in how they run their retail business, vote with your infrastructure dollars — that’s what’s paying for the show (well, that and their advertising business everyone ignores). Amazon’s AWS margin is everyone else’s opportunity.
- HatchedLake721 5y agoWhy do you feel you need to bring up Amazon retail, ethics and voting with dollars to a discussion about AWS data transfer price reduction?
- xwolfi 5y agoAnother crazy idiot single issue person who think companies have souls, fear punishment and are coherent :D Dude if you re sad you re paid a dollar too short in a warehouse, bullshitting about infra boycott will accomplish nothing, or at best, punish aws for something they cant control. Build a competitor if it s so easy to do the warehousing ethically, and you might even end up having amazon contract you if you re brilliant and cheap.
- slownews45 5y ago"The CloudFront free tier is a full-service free tier, meaning customers can use all CloudFront features, such as support of website images, media workloads, and APIs, without service restrictions or data type limitations." That's a pretty direct dig at cloudflare with their service and data type limitations :) So this does seem pretty cloudflare targeted.
- flatiron 5y agoCloud flare is the snowball coming down the mountain at them. Why not try to take a dig? You think they would be lowering their cost if it wasn’t for R2 or whatever they call it? Of course not!
- eins1234 5y agoAnd to be fair it's not a bad point. AWS and CloudFront is not without it's problems, but every time I've tried to build anything non-trivial with Cloudflare's CDN I've found that some table-stakes feature turns out to be locked behind a $5000+ enterprise plan, with no option to pay a more reasonable price for just the feature itself and associated usage. I've come to the conclusion that Cloudflare's CDN is only really worthwhile if I'm building something tiny and basic that will never conceivably need any of their enterprise features (and I've turned out to be wrong about this down the line on many occasions, so YMMV), or something super ambitious where I'm willing and able to go all in on the enterprise plan and hope that eventually economies of scale on egress costs will kick in and turn it into a good deal. That leaves a giant gaping hole in the middle where it makes more sense to go with a different CDN like Cloudfront or Fastly where the bandwidth isn't free, but advanced features are included or charged on a usage basis (these days most of my projects fall into this category).
- Karunamon 5y agoThis is a pretty big change for smaller players. AWS region free outbound tier is now 100GB instead of 1GB, and more importantly, the free tier is perpetual.
- mcherm 5y agoCloudflare, my hero! [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/
- gautamcgoel 5y agoIt's almost as if competition leads to lower prices for consumers! Who could have known?
- putlake 5y agoafaik Cloudflare prioritizes its paying customers over those on the free tier e.g. when there are limited resources at a POP. It's not clear whether Cloudfront will do the same -- does anyone know?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tuananh 5y agothis is barely an answer to cloudflare. aws still has a lot to do
- linsomniac 5y agoCoincidentally enough, on Monday I had a call with my AWS account rep, she was asking what plans we had for the next year. I told her that we were evaluating some of our spend to see if there were places we could economize, but our biggest plan was to move from S3+Cloudfront to Cloudflare R2. "Have you heard of R2?" "No, I'll check with one of my S3 engineers and get back to you." Sounds like SOMEBODY over there is trying to address the Bandwidth Alliance announcement.
- koolba 5y agoThis is massive. A 1TB outbound allowance will cover just about every non profitable use case. This means that a minimally sized t4.nano can operate for peanuts without an unknown component.
- rgun 5y agoThe 1TB allowance is only for Cloudfront. For general data egress (from ec2, directly from S3), it is just 100GB.
- _hyn3 5y agoAnd also every other smaller cloud provider provides at least 1TB of free transfer (OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Digital Ocean, etc). Even AWS's own Lightsail (which is so throttled that it's a far inferior solution to most of the other VPS/"cloud" providers) includes at least 1TB of transfer for free. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
- _hyn3 5y agoIn almost every case, inter-account and inter-AZ transfer will incur the same pricing as egress, especially if it travels through an IGW. In our internal testing, it appears that AWS often applies the egress pricing twice, both when leaving the AZ where your instance(s) are located as well as again in the region where your customers are, after traveling through the AWS internal network; the first is an inter-AZ transfer, and the second is the actual egress from AWS' network. So, it appears that the egress fees are nearly always not merely the oft-cited 8,000% greater than competitors, but twice that. AWS is not very transparent about this. Understatement of the year: "Data transfer charges are often overlooked while architecting a solution in AWS."[0] 0. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-t...
- nikprasad 5y agoIMHO this doesn't make a difference whatsoever. We used to run a cloud gaming company and you burn through your first 100Gb within no time. Applications where data transfer is >50% of your cost is not sustainable and by giving the first 100Gb free they're not really making a dent on cloud costs. They're still charging an insane amount for data and the worst part is the pricing is almost similar across regions where Tier 1 networks might not actually charge AWS that much. it's a total rip off. In our desperate search for cheaper services, we actually checked out Linode (I don't work with them in any way) and found their egress costs a lot more palatable.
- tony 5y agoCache invalidations are the ones that will really get you bad in CloudFront if you're not careful [1]. As a new user, I was working on publishing open source documentation via CloudFront (https://tmuxp.git-pull.com https://tmuxp.git-pull.com) and made a mistake of invalidating '*', and doing it every time I pushed to CI. This was sphinx-doc, so no cache-busting filenames. My bill was absolutely enormous. I chewed threw the free tier credits. If CloudFront ever gets more generous with invalidations, that'd help reduce the sting for those of us that make those early mistakes. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Invalidation.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
- sofixa 5y agoPro tip : for such scenarios (push static documentation), services such as Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Firebase Hosting are preferable. Their costs are lower, free tiers are highly generous, and cache invalidation is handled automatically.
- tony 5y agoI've tried AWS amplify and some cloudflare pages. I'm looking into some of those others for gatsby / next.js hosting. For gatsby sites and webpack apps, I did ultimately figure out and simplify my s3 / cloudfront deploys and only invalidate index.html. Ultimately it looks like I'm going to be migrating away to sphinx-doc. It's not up to date with the best practices in static site apps these days.