5 ms·

This is a loophole. Hitting some loss leader at AWS, but if everyone only buys the $1 hotdog and nothing else then the $1 hotdog gets removed.

danielklnstein 3y ago
I'm not sure how this could be removed - the fundamentals behind it are basic building blocks of S3. Maybe raising the cost of transient storage? e.g. If you have to pay for a minimum of a day's storage - but even if that was the case this would still be cost-effective, and at any rate it seems very unnatural for AWS to charge on such granularity. + I would guess that S3 is orders of magnitude more profitable for AWS than cross-AZ charges, so I'm not sure they'd consider it a loss-leader.
- kevincox 3y ago
  It would be fairly easy to change the pricing policy. GCP did something similar for cross-region https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network. This is pretty severe because it seems to affect all reads. However I can imagine an alternate implementation where the source AZ is tracked when data is written and egress fees are charged when the data is read (as if the data was always stored in the source AZ). This could even be done more complexly such as only charging the first time data is read in another AZ. Once you read once it is free as-if it is now cached in that new AZ forever. Another option would just be raising the minimum storage duration so that it basically costs all or most of what the data transfer would. It would definitely piss a lot of people off as it is adding to their bill, but it could likely be done in a way that makes exploiting this for just data transfer not worth it without adding huge costs to most "real" use cases.
  - danielklnstein 3y ago
    Yeah, I see what you mean - that'd indeed render this method ineffective. Like you said I'm sure this would bother a lot of customers, but it's not a completely unrealistic overhaul of S3 pricing. That being said, that'd be sort of "mean" of AWS to do - the data is already replicated across AZs whether you pay for it or not because of how S3 works.
api 3y ago
It’s not a loss leader. Cloud bandwidth pricing is almost pure profit.
- martinald 3y ago
  It's absolutely amazing that so many devs don't realise this. They seem to think that bandwidth should cost a few cents a month, when in reality it is virtually free. Perhaps the 7c/GB charge was reasonable when AWS came out 15 years ago, but networking has got orders of magnitude cheaper and faster in the intervening time period. What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious to anyone doing the math that it can't cost that much, otherwise a 200GB CoD install would be costing the ISP $20.
  - unclebucknasty 3y ago
    >it is virtually free The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle. So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?
    - martinald 3y ago
      That's why I said 'virtually'. Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month. Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.
      - Aissen 3y ago
        And at scale, AWS does not pay the HE price. So add another factor 3 to 10 there.
        api 3y ago
        Yep. Big cloud bandwidth is a 200X markup from list price. Its ludicrous. It serves two purposes for them. One is obviously a nice profit center. The other is that free ingress but expensive egress causes data to flow in but not out, creating a center of gravity and a form of lock in.

danielklnstein 3y ago

I'm not sure how this could be removed - the fundamentals behind it are basic building blocks of S3. Maybe raising the cost of transient storage? e.g. If you have to pay for a minimum of a day's storage - but even if that was the case this would still be cost-effective, and at any rate it seems very unnatural for AWS to charge on such granularity. + I would guess that S3 is orders of magnitude more profitable for AWS than cross-AZ charges, so I'm not sure they'd consider it a loss-leader.

kevincox 3y ago
It would be fairly easy to change the pricing policy. GCP did something similar for cross-region https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network. This is pretty severe because it seems to affect all reads. However I can imagine an alternate implementation where the source AZ is tracked when data is written and egress fees are charged when the data is read (as if the data was always stored in the source AZ). This could even be done more complexly such as only charging the first time data is read in another AZ. Once you read once it is free as-if it is now cached in that new AZ forever. Another option would just be raising the minimum storage duration so that it basically costs all or most of what the data transfer would. It would definitely piss a lot of people off as it is adding to their bill, but it could likely be done in a way that makes exploiting this for just data transfer not worth it without adding huge costs to most "real" use cases.
- danielklnstein 3y ago
  Yeah, I see what you mean - that'd indeed render this method ineffective. Like you said I'm sure this would bother a lot of customers, but it's not a completely unrealistic overhaul of S3 pricing. That being said, that'd be sort of "mean" of AWS to do - the data is already replicated across AZs whether you pay for it or not because of how S3 works.

api 3y ago

It’s not a loss leader. Cloud bandwidth pricing is almost pure profit.

martinald 3y ago
It's absolutely amazing that so many devs don't realise this. They seem to think that bandwidth should cost a few cents a month, when in reality it is virtually free. Perhaps the 7c/GB charge was reasonable when AWS came out 15 years ago, but networking has got orders of magnitude cheaper and faster in the intervening time period. What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious to anyone doing the math that it can't cost that much, otherwise a 200GB CoD install would be costing the ISP $20.
- unclebucknasty 3y ago
  >it is virtually free The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle. So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?
  - martinald 3y ago
    That's why I said 'virtually'. Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month. Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.
    - Aissen 3y ago
      And at scale, AWS does not pay the HE price. So add another factor 3 to 10 there.
      - api 3y ago
        Yep. Big cloud bandwidth is a 200X markup from list price. Its ludicrous. It serves two purposes for them. One is obviously a nice profit center. The other is that free ingress but expensive egress causes data to flow in but not out, creating a center of gravity and a form of lock in.