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The main issue we have with S3 is the extortionary egress bandwidth fee. Storage pricing seems OK, but what's the point if I can't send those files to users?

rckrd 4y ago
A bit tangential, but in some cases you can use S3 Gateway endpoints, which can dramatically reduce your egress costs if you're just accessing it within a VPC. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpoints-s3.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpo...
- judge2020 4y ago
  This is the entire point of the egress fees. If you can keep traffic inside AWS it's basically free. Getting it out costs money.
tpmx 4y ago
I think this would be an excellent area for regulation since it anti-competitive (portability is dramatically reduced since it has been made artifically expensive to move the data to another cloud service) and the cloud services haven't shown any interest in doing something about it on their own.
- sfe22 4y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that S3 is a monopoly with means to block competition. I mean even when discussing cloud in general, what you are suggesting is a joke.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Anti-competitive practices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices) don't require a monopoly.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Regulation for bringing down prices for unnecessary cloud services like hosting a file? Let's focus on things users cannot change. Using the cloud to host files is an easy and expensive way to store files that should be a luxury or a tax on the foolish.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    No, for bringing down the cost of moving that file to a competing cloud service provider.
gsanderson 4y ago
The margin on bandwidth is enormous. I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back. But there are rivals providing cheaper S3-compatible storage at scale. Cloudflare's R2 ($15/TB, and no fees for egress). Oracle Cloud Storage ($25/TB, and first 10TB of egress is free). There's Wasabi ($5.99/TB, and no fees for egress or API requests). To name but three. Of course each of those have drawbacks e.g Wasabi is intended for long-term storage, R2 is still in beta etc. But there are options for new data.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  > I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back I remember! They called it the Bandwidth Alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
  - gsanderson 4y ago
    Yes! That was it. There was a blog post too with the estimated markup: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I didn't realize Cloudflare R2 was available yet. Took a look based on your mention... "currently in beta". But you can still just sign up and use it already? Anyone here done that and want to report back? Ah, I found this posted by it's author elsewhere in these threads: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison Very useful. Wait.... "no public access" AND "no pre-signed URLs"? Am I misunderstanding what that means? That would seem to make this not use cases of serving files to end-users? or what am I missing?
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Overlooked this question: > But you can still just sign up and use it already Yes. You can just enter a credit card & start using it.
impulser_ 4y ago
Have you looked into other S3 compatible services? We switched to DO Spaces because of the lower bandwidth and storage fees. The savings was actually quite a bit and no noticeable differences for our use case. I know there are others services out there that are also s3 compatible and cheaper.
- judge2020 4y ago
  For my use case, DO Spaces was quite bad in terms of artifacts being served from stale caches after being replaced and the 'purge' API being called on the bucket; this was over 2 years ago so maybe it's better now.
  - jopsen 4y ago
    This is the other issue with using another cloud, S3 is extremely well documented. Some other cloud providers give no statement on reliability/availability/consistency. And worse some providers give statements that violates the CAP theorem. The big clouds are some what reasonably documented, but many smaller vendors leave you guessing, or promise what I know they can't keep.
themitigating 4y ago
Is that what S3 is for? I've used it to store large datasets that are processed within a region, a backup system, logs and metrics, and as an origin for CloudFront. I think you're referring to using to host a consumer download service because of web objects in a serious business you'll need a CDN.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  All S3 usage I have encountered in the wild has been user submitted files. Stuff like profile pics, document attachments, etc. You could in theory store these on the VMs storage but that encounters the frequent problem that the storage fills up. While S3 is unlimited and easy to integrate.

rckrd 4y ago

A bit tangential, but in some cases you can use S3 Gateway endpoints, which can dramatically reduce your egress costs if you're just accessing it within a VPC. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpoints-s3.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpo...

judge2020 4y ago
This is the entire point of the egress fees. If you can keep traffic inside AWS it's basically free. Getting it out costs money.

tpmx 4y ago

I think this would be an excellent area for regulation since it anti-competitive (portability is dramatically reduced since it has been made artifically expensive to move the data to another cloud service) and the cloud services haven't shown any interest in doing something about it on their own.

sfe22 4y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that S3 is a monopoly with means to block competition. I mean even when discussing cloud in general, what you are suggesting is a joke.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Anti-competitive practices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices) don't require a monopoly.
ipaddr 4y ago
Regulation for bringing down prices for unnecessary cloud services like hosting a file? Let's focus on things users cannot change. Using the cloud to host files is an easy and expensive way to store files that should be a luxury or a tax on the foolish.
- tpmx 4y ago
  No, for bringing down the cost of moving that file to a competing cloud service provider.

gsanderson 4y ago

The margin on bandwidth is enormous. I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back. But there are rivals providing cheaper S3-compatible storage at scale. Cloudflare's R2 ($15/TB, and no fees for egress). Oracle Cloud Storage ($25/TB, and first 10TB of egress is free). There's Wasabi ($5.99/TB, and no fees for egress or API requests). To name but three. Of course each of those have drawbacks e.g Wasabi is intended for long-term storage, R2 is still in beta etc. But there are options for new data.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
> I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back I remember! They called it the Bandwidth Alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
- gsanderson 4y ago
  Yes! That was it. There was a blog post too with the estimated markup: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
jrochkind1 4y ago
I didn't realize Cloudflare R2 was available yet. Took a look based on your mention... "currently in beta". But you can still just sign up and use it already? Anyone here done that and want to report back? Ah, I found this posted by it's author elsewhere in these threads: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison Very useful. Wait.... "no public access" AND "no pre-signed URLs"? Am I misunderstanding what that means? That would seem to make this not use cases of serving files to end-users? or what am I missing?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Overlooked this question: > But you can still just sign up and use it already Yes. You can just enter a credit card & start using it.

impulser_ 4y ago

Have you looked into other S3 compatible services? We switched to DO Spaces because of the lower bandwidth and storage fees. The savings was actually quite a bit and no noticeable differences for our use case. I know there are others services out there that are also s3 compatible and cheaper.

judge2020 4y ago
For my use case, DO Spaces was quite bad in terms of artifacts being served from stale caches after being replaced and the 'purge' API being called on the bucket; this was over 2 years ago so maybe it's better now.
- jopsen 4y ago
  This is the other issue with using another cloud, S3 is extremely well documented. Some other cloud providers give no statement on reliability/availability/consistency. And worse some providers give statements that violates the CAP theorem. The big clouds are some what reasonably documented, but many smaller vendors leave you guessing, or promise what I know they can't keep.

themitigating 4y ago

Is that what S3 is for? I've used it to store large datasets that are processed within a region, a backup system, logs and metrics, and as an origin for CloudFront. I think you're referring to using to host a consumer download service because of web objects in a serious business you'll need a CDN.

Gigachad 4y ago
All S3 usage I have encountered in the wild has been user submitted files. Stuff like profile pics, document attachments, etc. You could in theory store these on the VMs storage but that encounters the frequent problem that the storage fills up. While S3 is unlimited and easy to integrate.