[toyg]

I guess they have additional legal constraints that don’t allow them to just “land space” here or there - the vendor must probably be security-vetted, compliant to a hundred government-produced checklists, and willing to go through extra-long sales and support cycles. It will inevitably push up prices significantly.

In fact, I can imagine ops-teams at Nasa licking their lips at the idea of doing away with a lot of that bureaucracy once they switch to AWS... note how the report mentions that some of the controllers are actual sponsors of the move: it’s obviously a conflict of interest, but it might well arise when the org as a whole is a bit too happy to steer away from a suboptimal situation.

This said, AWS will rob them blind, simply because they can. Like all outsourcers (which is effectively what they are), they get in with the simplicity argument, then boil that frog up with extra charges. It’s good that somebody pointed out one of those charges, but I doubt anything will change substantially- Amazon will probably cut them a discount and that will be it. And once you’re invested in a cloud env to the tune of hundreds of petabytes, you’ll likely not switch away for decades.

[Karunamon]

>..then boil that frog up with extra charges.

That implies a level of dishonesty or nontransparency that AWS doesn't have. Their pricing is disclosed, up front, and they offer a calculator to model your costs out. Knowing how much data egress you're going to have is not some arcane art, NASA just plain forgot to do it.

It may be complicated, but so is any workload at this size. Figuring the cost is part of due dilligence, and they've made it as straightforward as possible.

[toyg]

> That implies a level of dishonesty or nontransparency that AWS doesn't have.

Have you ever been part to an enterprise-level sales cycle? Things like the official calculator are waved away, since the customer is on a special deal, so "of course is not as much as that!". The customer asks for a quote with a certain degree of detail, the vendor provides an answer with the degree of accuracy required to get them in the door. If it turns out after a year that the customer ended up paying 2x, well, too bad - clearly they must have had higher requirements than forecasted! "Did you record all your traffic? No? Well, we did, and the result is this bill, sorry. Alright, alright, I hear your complaint, I tell you what - I'll give you a big discount on your next order, what about that?" Rinse, repeat. This is not dishonesty and I'm not alleging malfeasance or anything like that, it's just how that world works in my experience.

In order to figure out the real cost of outsourcing, you need an adversarial attitude that most shops simply lack, because they've fundamentally made the choice to abandon the previous solution even before they've entered the sales cycle. This is particularly clear in a case where some controller is also part of the group promoting the switch. It's surprising it was flagged up, there must be a competing group somewhere that is desperately trying to fight on - maybe some Oracle-friendly "japanese in the jungle" or something. Or maybe bureaucratic procedures to safeguard the institution are actually working as they should, for once, but that would be pretty exceptional in itself.

[Spooky23]

That's a half-truth.

All of the cloud vendors de-empathize network egress costs. It's similar to products that depend on Microsoft licensing who will always omit those types of costs. (Oh, so you needed to spend another $500k in SQL Server Enterprise?)

Many organizations lack the operational metrics to allow them to effectively measure their egress needs. And AWS/GCP/MS salesmen arent in the business of slowing down deals with awkward questions.

This is especially true where an org like NASA probably contracts out things like network services. Going from a model where you make fixed capital investments to paying for the byte is difficult to measure.

[Karunamon]

I'm not sure what you mean by "de-empathize".

Here's the official pricing calculator[1] - note that ingress and egress costs are included in all relevant services. Also note that for something like S3 (which is probably what the article mentions the "earthdata cloud" is based on), the pricing details are right there on the description page[2].

There is no evidence of any malfeasance by AWS here, just lots of casting aspersions. What specifically do you want that was not provided?

[1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/