120TB of storage is 3k USD per month when using s3 in Singapore and can sustain a much higher aggregate read/write speed than their existing setup. Like many h

120TB of storage is 3k USD per month when using s3 in Singapore and can sustain a much higher aggregate read/write speed than their existing setup. Like many have said, a lift and shift is never great, and imagining you need 120TB of EBS per instance then being surprised it costs a lot is rather telling about the accuracy of such estimations. Nothing was mentioned about utilisation - like basically everything, services follow a utilisation trend across a given time period. This assumes 100% used capacity at all times. Moving to S3 and being able to scale down to 50% capacity at non-peak hours seems to nearly equal the cost, aside from the human+time cost savings. Using spot instances would also save even more. Lock in also takes many forms. If you’re locked in to an infrastructure that only supports a certain type of system with big bulky servers and big bulky disks, then you’re going to build that kind of system. You can’t take advantage of something like a lambda for specific parts of your scraping pipeline, or SQS or S3. These are useful things to have at your disposal when designing systems.