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The bandwidth between AWS regions and Cloudfront is free so you can save a lot here as well while improving performance for your end users. And on the Cloudfron

by athrun 12y ago

The bandwidth between AWS regions and Cloudfront is free so you can save a lot here as well while improving performance for your end users. And on the Cloudfront side, you can negotiate pricing to further reduce the cost. Edit with Source: Cloudfront pricing page: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ "If you are using an AWS origin, effective December 1, 2014, data transferred from origin to edge locations (Amazon CloudFront "origin fetches") will be free of charge."

skuhn 12y ago
Cloudfront is cheaper, that is true. The same 500mbit/s outbound via Cloudfront is $381,173 for 3 years at list prices. I think that this has given Cloudfront an enormous pricing advantage in the CDN market, considering that using any other CDN means paying EC2/S3-outbound plus the third-party CDN's prices. If your content is highly cacheable, you can still use a third-party CDN and come out ahead. Since your EC2/S3 outbound will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of the total outbound, it starts to not really matter. For dynamic content, you're essentially being double billed, which is undesirable. Either way, you're not going to get content out of AWS for an order of magnitude less money, which is what you can get in a conventional datacenter build. AWS is billing CDN-style: per byte transferred. When combined with the hit rate, this makes some amount of sense for a CDN service (like Cloudfront): every byte transferred has an impact on the edge caches. I don't think that it makes much sense to bill EC2 bandwidth this way, but since people are obviously willing to pay it, Amazon has no real incentive to restructure their pricing. This practice is probably the single largest source of lock-in for AWS, even above all of their hosted services like ELB and SQS. It's also why startups that run out of money sometimes can't let people take their data (photos or whatever): they simply can't afford the outbound bandwidth fees.

by athrun 12y ago

skuhn 12y ago

Cloudfront is cheaper, that is true. The same 500mbit/s outbound via Cloudfront is $381,173 for 3 years at list prices. I think that this has given Cloudfront an enormous pricing advantage in the CDN market, considering that using any other CDN means paying EC2/S3-outbound plus the third-party CDN's prices. If your content is highly cacheable, you can still use a third-party CDN and come out ahead. Since your EC2/S3 outbound will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of the total outbound, it starts to not really matter. For dynamic content, you're essentially being double billed, which is undesirable. Either way, you're not going to get content out of AWS for an order of magnitude less money, which is what you can get in a conventional datacenter build. AWS is billing CDN-style: per byte transferred. When combined with the hit rate, this makes some amount of sense for a CDN service (like Cloudfront): every byte transferred has an impact on the edge caches. I don't think that it makes much sense to bill EC2 bandwidth this way, but since people are obviously willing to pay it, Amazon has no real incentive to restructure their pricing. This practice is probably the single largest source of lock-in for AWS, even above all of their hosted services like ELB and SQS. It's also why startups that run out of money sometimes can't let people take their data (photos or whatever): they simply can't afford the outbound bandwidth fees.