5 ms·
This was my take-away from the Google Cloud pricing changes yesterday. By reducing CPU costs, my bandwidth just becomes even more the dominant cost, so further
by davidjgraph 13y ago
This was my take-away from the Google Cloud pricing changes yesterday. By reducing CPU costs, my bandwidth just becomes even more the dominant cost, so further reductions help me less and less.
AWS users will end up with the same problem in time. I wonder why the bandwidth costs are so subborn, does the cost price per traffic unit really never come down, or is someone (some people) in the infrastructure layer(s) screwing us?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAt the scale large providers operate at, they don't pay per GB, they pay at the 95th percentile for Gb/10Gb links. It's the same way you pay a fixed hourly rate (in most cases) for your retail electricity, and your provider is paying wholesale spot market rates that can fluctuate in ~5 minute windows. TL;DR You're paying for consistency and abstraction away from the underlying IP transport costs.
- wmf 13y agoTransit costs less than $1/Mbps/month, which works out to only a few cents/GB. It still looks like pretty high markup.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoYou're assuming its only the transit cost (as does my original cost); it could also be to discourage use of S3 for mass public serving due to architectural constraints. My understanding is that S3 is near indestructible from a serving perspective, but it may be computationally expensive for AWS to scale up/scale down for bursty/peaking outbound traffic serving needs. Another possibility is that Amazon doesn't charge for inbound, but charges a premium for outbound to balance their traffic ratios so they can peer with providers vs having to buy their transit. The free inbound traffic to S3 offsets their outbound traffic not only from AWS, but their consumer-facing web properties. As always, just my assumptions/observations.