5 ms·

I think egress would benefit from some regulation. This would enable other companies to compete with specific AWS services, without competing with AWS as a whol

I think egress would benefit from some regulation. This would enable other companies to compete with specific AWS services, without competing with AWS as a whole. Though I probably wouldn't price cap egress itself, but rather force amazon to offer cheap peering.

adventured 3y ago
Amazon & Co. will always rule for the exact same reason Microsoft Office has/will. It's the combination of services effect creating a natural moat. There's nothing you can do about that other than to break up the large entities, it forms by default unless you do that. It requires a comically enormous burden placed on the entity to break it because of how fantastically strong the combination effect is for customers, cheap peering won't touch it. So long as they don't put too many barriers up (raising the cost through unnecessary regulation to cut out the competition, which would benefit AWS), we'll always have competitive alternatives, including running your own infrastructure inexpensively with companies like Hetzner or Cloudflare (depending on what you need).
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > So long as they don't put too many barriers up (raising the cost through unnecessary regulation to cut out the competition, which would benefit AWS), we'll always have competitive alternatives, including running your own infrastructure inexpensively with companies like Hetzner or Cloudflare (depending on what you need). I mean, if the article mentions small businesses in particular, their needs are probably met by software running on a few VPSes. As long as they don't want to leverage any advanced features that the PaaS/SaaS providers would give them, most of the affordable providers should be enough: Hetzner, Contabo, Time4VPS, or even Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Vultr and so on. Probably pick a company that has been around for >5 or >10 years instead of something on LowEndBox that might disappear a year or two down the line, but other than that it's likely to be fine (as long as you have backups figured out and have either some redundancy/failover, or just are okay with downtime).
bnprks 3y ago
Agree 100%. I've always found it surprising there isn't a requirement for symmetric bandwidth charges. I think it's fine if AWS wants to have expensive bandwidth, but having free ingress + exorbitant egress seems like a transparent attempt at preventing customers from partial migrations to competitors.

adventured 3y ago

Amazon & Co. will always rule for the exact same reason Microsoft Office has/will. It's the combination of services effect creating a natural moat. There's nothing you can do about that other than to break up the large entities, it forms by default unless you do that. It requires a comically enormous burden placed on the entity to break it because of how fantastically strong the combination effect is for customers, cheap peering won't touch it. So long as they don't put too many barriers up (raising the cost through unnecessary regulation to cut out the competition, which would benefit AWS), we'll always have competitive alternatives, including running your own infrastructure inexpensively with companies like Hetzner or Cloudflare (depending on what you need).

KronisLV 3y ago
> So long as they don't put too many barriers up (raising the cost through unnecessary regulation to cut out the competition, which would benefit AWS), we'll always have competitive alternatives, including running your own infrastructure inexpensively with companies like Hetzner or Cloudflare (depending on what you need). I mean, if the article mentions small businesses in particular, their needs are probably met by software running on a few VPSes. As long as they don't want to leverage any advanced features that the PaaS/SaaS providers would give them, most of the affordable providers should be enough: Hetzner, Contabo, Time4VPS, or even Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Vultr and so on. Probably pick a company that has been around for >5 or >10 years instead of something on LowEndBox that might disappear a year or two down the line, but other than that it's likely to be fine (as long as you have backups figured out and have either some redundancy/failover, or just are okay with downtime).

bnprks 3y ago

Agree 100%. I've always found it surprising there isn't a requirement for symmetric bandwidth charges. I think it's fine if AWS wants to have expensive bandwidth, but having free ingress + exorbitant egress seems like a transparent attempt at preventing customers from partial migrations to competitors.