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Bandwidth is rarely an issue if you're transferring mostly text, often an issue if you're transferring images (except for highly cacheable static images), and a

Bandwidth is rarely an issue if you're transferring mostly text, often an issue if you're transferring images (except for highly cacheable static images), and always an issue if you're transferring video or game assets. That's just how it works because the orders of magnitude differ so much. An image resource can easily be 100x some text (or HTML or API response), and a video can easily be 1000x an image. Another factor is cacheability. If you're a B2B SaaS business you'll have few clients and can take advantage of caching much more typically. If you're B2C that flips and caching might not provide much benefit. Anecdotally, on a medium sized ecommerce store, AWS egress for product images was a huge cost.

mlhpdx 3y ago
Thank you, the e-commerce example is definitely something I hadn’t thought about. Having high quality imagery helps make sales but comes at a cost. Looking around at some sites I buy from, I think I can squint and see this “out in plain sight”.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  In fact an interesting detail of the ecommerce image situation is that you can somewhat trade-off bandwidth and compute. Creating resized images is expensive (we had ~2m unique images viewed per month), but if you can resize an image down and compress it well you might save 80% of the bandwidth on it, and deliver a better UX due to faster images. We did a bit of modelling to figure out how many sizes we wanted to deliver in order to get the best compute/bandwidth trade-off. This can be tricky for many companies but we were in a weird position because we had a large catalog compared to order volume, because of how the business worked. Video is an even better one. While we didn't have to deal with it in ecommerce, so many social applications are built around video. That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube/TikTok/etc, but also smaller things like BeReal who I'd guess are built entirely on cloud infra, even embedded videos in Mastodon posts. A similar thing could even be said about Podcasting/audio – not as bad as video, but there are specialist podcast hosts for a reason, and it's not that they do a great job, it's because they have cheap bandwidth.

mlhpdx 3y ago

Thank you, the e-commerce example is definitely something I hadn’t thought about. Having high quality imagery helps make sales but comes at a cost. Looking around at some sites I buy from, I think I can squint and see this “out in plain sight”.

danpalmer 3y ago
In fact an interesting detail of the ecommerce image situation is that you can somewhat trade-off bandwidth and compute. Creating resized images is expensive (we had ~2m unique images viewed per month), but if you can resize an image down and compress it well you might save 80% of the bandwidth on it, and deliver a better UX due to faster images. We did a bit of modelling to figure out how many sizes we wanted to deliver in order to get the best compute/bandwidth trade-off. This can be tricky for many companies but we were in a weird position because we had a large catalog compared to order volume, because of how the business worked. Video is an even better one. While we didn't have to deal with it in ecommerce, so many social applications are built around video. That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube/TikTok/etc, but also smaller things like BeReal who I'd guess are built entirely on cloud infra, even embedded videos in Mastodon posts. A similar thing could even be said about Podcasting/audio – not as bad as video, but there are specialist podcast hosts for a reason, and it's not that they do a great job, it's because they have cheap bandwidth.