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> Here’s an example: Last year, AWS dramatically reduced data egress charges, under pressure from CloudFlare, Oracle, and of course their customers. This is an

> Here’s an example: Last year, AWS dramatically reduced data egress charges, under pressure from CloudFlare, Oracle, and of course their customers. This is an argument for how bad lock-in is though! AWS was fucking everyone on egress price and nobody could do anything about it. It was not dropped until a serious alternative to the moat came in. That’s not an example of some innovation or anything like that. It’s exactly like the Microsoft and oracle examples where the cloud is just extracting as much as the market will bear.

rmbyrro 5y ago
Isn't it what we also do when we negotiate the highest possible salary? What's so terribly and inherently immoral to that? To me this sounds a bit ideological-driven decision making. The fact is they never raised their prices. People decided to use knowing the price. They weren't screwed afterwards. If the service is saving precious time and money, buying opportunity for the business, why would I ditch it? Because AWS is extracting as much as they can? Great, I wanna use services from successful people. I just want them to come forward in advance about how much they cost, not later after I decided.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Yeah i feel like this point is often conveniently overlooked because it's just uncomfortable.. HN comments often lean towards maximizing comp, thus tacitly endorsing the company to maximize stock price so their RSUs are worth more. But they don't like seeing the other end of where the money comes from..
- Kinrany 5y ago
  The argument is that this is rent-seeking. A mechanism like this allows the company to capture 99% of the value they add compared to their competitors, which is obviously not fair.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Rent-seeking involves manipulating public policy to artificially increase profits. This isn't really the case, is it? The point sometimes people miss is that the value of a service varies to each person, business or team. It might be that, for you, in the contexts you were in, they were capturing too much with their price to the point its not advantageous for you to use the service. That's fine, use something else. But it doesn't mean everyone lives the exact same experience as you.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Rent seeking doesn't require manipulating public policy, manipulating public policy is an effective method of rent seeking. I think vendor lock-in leading to higher prices is an example of rent seeking. The prices are going up not because that cloud provider is doing more/better things, but because of social things built around it
      - rmbyrro 5y ago
        This isn't rent seeking, it's called sales. You may not like it, but it's how the world works and what puts food on our tables. The problem I see with vendor lock-in is when, after you're locked, the service provider exploit this to change their terms (price and/or else) in a disproportionate and unjustifiable way against your initial interests in the service. This never happened with AWS, to my knowledge (please correct if I'm wrong). Everyone knew the price when they subscribed. Little changed afterwards. AWS was able to meet a demand with quality enough products in an acceptable price to whoever decided to buy. This is a commercial transaction. They're tremendously successful at marketing, sales and delivering, and that's OK. They don't have to be ashamed of that, there's nothing immoral or "rent-seeking" here. They're providing a service and selling it honestly, with transparent and predictable prices. Lock-in exploitation happened with GCP at least once, that I know, with App Engine. And their service was doomed after that, as developers reacted against their practice and they weren't able to grow past a tiny fraction of the market.
        pritambaral 5y ago
        > The problem I see with vendor lock-in is when, after you're locked, the service provider exploit this to change their terms (price and/or else) in a disproportionate and unjustifiable way against your initial interests in the service. > This never happened with AWS, to my knowledge (please correct if I'm wrong). Everyone knew the price when they subscribed. Little changed afterwards. AWS was able to meet a demand with quality enough products in an acceptable price to whoever decided to buy. Vendor lock-in does not require any changes to terms, price, or any part of the service or product provided. In most classically studied cases of vendor lock-in (e.g., Microsoft Windows and Office binary formats, VHS vs. Beta), everyone knew the lack of interoperability when they bought the service/good, and nothing changed afterwards. That didn't stop those cases from becoming "vendor lock-in".
- kortilla 5y ago
  Sure, but don’t pretend AWS is purely driven by innovation and delivering value to customers. Just say that AWS is trying to extract as much money as customers are willing to pay regardless of how little something costs them because they have a moat.
WalterGR 5y ago
It turns out other tech companies are actually doing business as usual, not just the ones we love to hate such as Microsoft and Oracle? I feel like scales have dropped from your eyes. :( Sorry buddy.
oneplane 5y ago
That has nothing to do with lock-in, you can still do your business elsewhere and have egress. It is more like the position of power AWS has; you can go elsewhere, but you'd have to choose not to make use of the facilities AWS provides. So you either pay for egress at AWS, or pay for reinventing the wheel elsewhere so you won't have to pay the same egress rates.
- stavros 5y ago
  How does it not have anything to do with lock-in? They literally make it expensive to use someone else's services, outside of the AWS data center.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Lock-in means "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering", not "network costs money".
    - pritambaral 5y ago
      > "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering", not "network costs money" Correction: "Network costs obscene amounts of money" ~= "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering"
      - oneplane 5y ago
        That's not hard, just costly. Hard would be "here is your data in an obscure binary format and we are not going to tell you how to decode it". If you want to make a point of it being expensive, just say that it is expensive. Expensive isn't hard, it's just a calculation.
        pritambaral 5y ago
        > That's not hard, just costly. "High cost" doesn't mean "not hard". "Hard" isn't exclusively owned by engineers; business decisions can also be hard. > Hard would be ... Stop right there. You're awfully close to gatekeeping what "hard" means, but you have artificially limited your vision to "hard engineering problems". > Expensive isn't hard, it's just a calculation. Everything is a calculation. The cost of reverse engineering (or using an RE'd method) is a calculation. The cost of switching is a calculation. Deciding where to stop when making a pithy comment on a forum is a calculation. Here's a simple method to determine (in the context of lock-in) what's "hard": is it significantly preventing you from doing what you want? Maybe you have a lot of money to burn in getting your own data out from a predatory silo, so it's not "hard" for you, but consider that not everyone might be in the same boat as you.
Dunedan 5y ago
> AWS was fucking everyone on egress price […] And they of course still are, as they didn't change anything related to the prices, but just increased the amount of traffic in their free tiers. That removed the pain for toy projects and workloads not requiring much egress traffic, but doesn't really make a difference for traffic heavy applications. For example transferring 10TB/month from EC2 in us-east-1 to the internet did cost $899.91 before and costs $891 now. For reference here is the announcement of these changes: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer-expansion-100-gb-from-regions-and-1-tb-from-amazon-cloudfront-per-month/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer...
- Spivak 5y ago
  Because the reality is that the bulk of people complaining aren't established businesses who actually look at the pricing before buying but tiny startups and toy projects strapped for cash. Sure it's highway robbery but they neatly segmented the market into the people who are and the people who don't and charged the former less.

rmbyrro 5y ago

Isn't it what we also do when we negotiate the highest possible salary? What's so terribly and inherently immoral to that? To me this sounds a bit ideological-driven decision making. The fact is they never raised their prices. People decided to use knowing the price. They weren't screwed afterwards. If the service is saving precious time and money, buying opportunity for the business, why would I ditch it? Because AWS is extracting as much as they can? Great, I wanna use services from successful people. I just want them to come forward in advance about how much they cost, not later after I decided.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Yeah i feel like this point is often conveniently overlooked because it's just uncomfortable.. HN comments often lean towards maximizing comp, thus tacitly endorsing the company to maximize stock price so their RSUs are worth more. But they don't like seeing the other end of where the money comes from..
Kinrany 5y ago
The argument is that this is rent-seeking. A mechanism like this allows the company to capture 99% of the value they add compared to their competitors, which is obviously not fair.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Rent-seeking involves manipulating public policy to artificially increase profits. This isn't really the case, is it? The point sometimes people miss is that the value of a service varies to each person, business or team. It might be that, for you, in the contexts you were in, they were capturing too much with their price to the point its not advantageous for you to use the service. That's fine, use something else. But it doesn't mean everyone lives the exact same experience as you.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Rent seeking doesn't require manipulating public policy, manipulating public policy is an effective method of rent seeking. I think vendor lock-in leading to higher prices is an example of rent seeking. The prices are going up not because that cloud provider is doing more/better things, but because of social things built around it
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      This isn't rent seeking, it's called sales. You may not like it, but it's how the world works and what puts food on our tables. The problem I see with vendor lock-in is when, after you're locked, the service provider exploit this to change their terms (price and/or else) in a disproportionate and unjustifiable way against your initial interests in the service. This never happened with AWS, to my knowledge (please correct if I'm wrong). Everyone knew the price when they subscribed. Little changed afterwards. AWS was able to meet a demand with quality enough products in an acceptable price to whoever decided to buy. This is a commercial transaction. They're tremendously successful at marketing, sales and delivering, and that's OK. They don't have to be ashamed of that, there's nothing immoral or "rent-seeking" here. They're providing a service and selling it honestly, with transparent and predictable prices. Lock-in exploitation happened with GCP at least once, that I know, with App Engine. And their service was doomed after that, as developers reacted against their practice and they weren't able to grow past a tiny fraction of the market.
      - pritambaral 5y ago
        > The problem I see with vendor lock-in is when, after you're locked, the service provider exploit this to change their terms (price and/or else) in a disproportionate and unjustifiable way against your initial interests in the service. > This never happened with AWS, to my knowledge (please correct if I'm wrong). Everyone knew the price when they subscribed. Little changed afterwards. AWS was able to meet a demand with quality enough products in an acceptable price to whoever decided to buy. Vendor lock-in does not require any changes to terms, price, or any part of the service or product provided. In most classically studied cases of vendor lock-in (e.g., Microsoft Windows and Office binary formats, VHS vs. Beta), everyone knew the lack of interoperability when they bought the service/good, and nothing changed afterwards. That didn't stop those cases from becoming "vendor lock-in".
kortilla 5y ago
Sure, but don’t pretend AWS is purely driven by innovation and delivering value to customers. Just say that AWS is trying to extract as much money as customers are willing to pay regardless of how little something costs them because they have a moat.

WalterGR 5y ago

It turns out other tech companies are actually doing business as usual, not just the ones we love to hate such as Microsoft and Oracle? I feel like scales have dropped from your eyes. :( Sorry buddy.

oneplane 5y ago

That has nothing to do with lock-in, you can still do your business elsewhere and have egress. It is more like the position of power AWS has; you can go elsewhere, but you'd have to choose not to make use of the facilities AWS provides. So you either pay for egress at AWS, or pay for reinventing the wheel elsewhere so you won't have to pay the same egress rates.

stavros 5y ago
How does it not have anything to do with lock-in? They literally make it expensive to use someone else's services, outside of the AWS data center.
- oneplane 5y ago
  Lock-in means "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering", not "network costs money".
  - pritambaral 5y ago
    > "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering", not "network costs money" Correction: "Network costs obscene amounts of money" ~= "making it hard to move your business data and processes to a different offering"
    - oneplane 5y ago
      That's not hard, just costly. Hard would be "here is your data in an obscure binary format and we are not going to tell you how to decode it". If you want to make a point of it being expensive, just say that it is expensive. Expensive isn't hard, it's just a calculation.
      - pritambaral 5y ago
        > That's not hard, just costly. "High cost" doesn't mean "not hard". "Hard" isn't exclusively owned by engineers; business decisions can also be hard. > Hard would be ... Stop right there. You're awfully close to gatekeeping what "hard" means, but you have artificially limited your vision to "hard engineering problems". > Expensive isn't hard, it's just a calculation. Everything is a calculation. The cost of reverse engineering (or using an RE'd method) is a calculation. The cost of switching is a calculation. Deciding where to stop when making a pithy comment on a forum is a calculation. Here's a simple method to determine (in the context of lock-in) what's "hard": is it significantly preventing you from doing what you want? Maybe you have a lot of money to burn in getting your own data out from a predatory silo, so it's not "hard" for you, but consider that not everyone might be in the same boat as you.

Dunedan 5y ago

> AWS was fucking everyone on egress price […] And they of course still are, as they didn't change anything related to the prices, but just increased the amount of traffic in their free tiers. That removed the pain for toy projects and workloads not requiring much egress traffic, but doesn't really make a difference for traffic heavy applications. For example transferring 10TB/month from EC2 in us-east-1 to the internet did cost $899.91 before and costs $891 now. For reference here is the announcement of these changes: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer-expansion-100-gb-from-regions-and-1-tb-from-amazon-cloudfront-per-month/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer...

Spivak 5y ago
Because the reality is that the bulk of people complaining aren't established businesses who actually look at the pricing before buying but tiny startups and toy projects strapped for cash. Sure it's highway robbery but they neatly segmented the market into the people who are and the people who don't and charged the former less.