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The one AWS service that I pay for is S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It is very cheap insurance for knowing with virtual certainty that your data exists. Egress is e

The one AWS service that I pay for is S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It is very cheap insurance for knowing with virtual certainty that your data exists. Egress is expensive ($100/TB last I checked), but in the target use - backups of last resort - I will be very glad to pay that to have my data back. And if all goes right I'll never pay it. Personally I find ordinary S3 far too expensive to justify. Not so with Deep Archive. Note, I work for AWS. Opinions are my own.

Nathanba 4y ago
It might be cheap now but there is absolutely no guarantee that one day they'll send out a fairly nondescriptive AGB update email and increase the prices without you knowing. Then because all these ever so helpful cloud services don't allow you to create payment caps the costs can explode any day. It's all one executive decision away.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  I feel like AWS has a pretty good track record at this point for not increasing prices - certainly to the point that I trust them not to pull an Oracle. (Hypothetically, my volume of data stored with them is low enough that even a 10x gouge would just make me angry, not wound me financially. There's not a mechanism for these archives to incur explosive costs, but your point is why I avoid other less-predictable cloud services.)
  - faangiq 4y ago
    Don’t be silly. It’s a game theoretic certainty that they will indeed pull an Oracle.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      There's no need to act condescending or call people names ("silly"). A 15 year track record and a public commitment aren't things you can hand wave away. I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.
      - jb_s 4y ago
        The parent put it too strongly but it's equally naive to assume that track records and public commitments mean anything to a privately-held company, with a commitment to profit shareholders, run by Jeff Bezos.
        nindalf 4y ago
        I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out. Of course AWS needs to make money. Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices. Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise. Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022. You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?
- hcazz 4y ago
  Historically speaking, in the ~15 years AWS has been around, have they ever increased prices for any service? In my experience, they've only ever decreased prices of their services as advances in tech have been made rather than increasing them. Sure some start out being expensive cough Macie and Fargate cough but they didn't increase prices after being launched as far as I'm aware. Assuming they never have increased a price in 15 years, that doesn't prevent them from doing so, but it's a confidence inspiring track record. I have about as much confidence that AWS won't raise prices on existing services/features as I do that Google will eventually kill another good project - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - Nathanba 4y ago
    The fact that they don't have a simple price cap setting proves to me that they have no intention of being on my side. Promises of businesses that they won't increase prices are .. well, it just means almost nothing to me. It's "nice".
bringthesaas 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you think a fair price for s3 would be? I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up (I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  To be clear, I have no special insight into underlying S3 costs. Only the perspective of a customer. My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets a price, I expect that's pretty close to the minimum sustainable price, because they've spent a lot of effort on that. B2 currently charges $5/TB/mo with lots of options for bandwidth that's too cheap to meter. This strikes me as pretty fair overall.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier. But the bandwidth is a huge issue.
    - thrtythreeforty 4y ago
      In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though. [1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Resiliency-Durability-and-Availability https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        The data is only stored in one data center, and the 99.9 and 99.99 percentile latency on requests is not good and can cause issues depending on use case. And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway. > I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though. Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.

Nathanba 4y ago

It might be cheap now but there is absolutely no guarantee that one day they'll send out a fairly nondescriptive AGB update email and increase the prices without you knowing. Then because all these ever so helpful cloud services don't allow you to create payment caps the costs can explode any day. It's all one executive decision away.

thrtythreeforty 4y ago
I feel like AWS has a pretty good track record at this point for not increasing prices - certainly to the point that I trust them not to pull an Oracle. (Hypothetically, my volume of data stored with them is low enough that even a 10x gouge would just make me angry, not wound me financially. There's not a mechanism for these archives to incur explosive costs, but your point is why I avoid other less-predictable cloud services.)
- faangiq 4y ago
  Don’t be silly. It’s a game theoretic certainty that they will indeed pull an Oracle.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    There's no need to act condescending or call people names ("silly"). A 15 year track record and a public commitment aren't things you can hand wave away. I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.
    - jb_s 4y ago
      The parent put it too strongly but it's equally naive to assume that track records and public commitments mean anything to a privately-held company, with a commitment to profit shareholders, run by Jeff Bezos.
      - nindalf 4y ago
        I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out. Of course AWS needs to make money. Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices. Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise. Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022. You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?
hcazz 4y ago
Historically speaking, in the ~15 years AWS has been around, have they ever increased prices for any service? In my experience, they've only ever decreased prices of their services as advances in tech have been made rather than increasing them. Sure some start out being expensive cough Macie and Fargate cough but they didn't increase prices after being launched as far as I'm aware. Assuming they never have increased a price in 15 years, that doesn't prevent them from doing so, but it's a confidence inspiring track record. I have about as much confidence that AWS won't raise prices on existing services/features as I do that Google will eventually kill another good project - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- Nathanba 4y ago
  The fact that they don't have a simple price cap setting proves to me that they have no intention of being on my side. Promises of businesses that they won't increase prices are .. well, it just means almost nothing to me. It's "nice".

bringthesaas 4y ago

Out of curiosity, what do you think a fair price for s3 would be? I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up (I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)

thrtythreeforty 4y ago
To be clear, I have no special insight into underlying S3 costs. Only the perspective of a customer. My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets a price, I expect that's pretty close to the minimum sustainable price, because they've spent a lot of effort on that. B2 currently charges $5/TB/mo with lots of options for bandwidth that's too cheap to meter. This strikes me as pretty fair overall.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier. But the bandwidth is a huge issue.
  - thrtythreeforty 4y ago
    In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though. [1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Resiliency-Durability-and-Availability https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      The data is only stored in one data center, and the 99.9 and 99.99 percentile latency on requests is not good and can cause issues depending on use case. And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway. > I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though. Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.