[slownews45]

Let's be crystal crystal clear here. If I host a high data use video site on AWS, I can calculate what my costs will be. That provides me some certainty with respect to a business plan. Even better, AWS does have a history that is much better than others in terms of pricing stability. This doesn't mean best price.

Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.

AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.

This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.

People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.

In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.

AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.

1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.

Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.

The "free" offerings are an old story by now.

[windexh8er]

It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how, just because Amazon's price model has been reliable, that it must be a viable cost because people pay it. It's unfortunate that the reality you're basing this comment on is so far off base that you've convinced yourself AWS egress fees are somehow "stable". It's also very interesting that you're stating Cloudflare is under some unforeseen "pressure" because they're not turning a profit today. I would gather you're assuming Cloudflare is being soaked by infrastructure costs, which is completely incorrect, as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market by investing in their field (sales) and continually reinvesting in R&D.

It's also fantastic to read the misconceptions of the "value" AWS is providing. In some cases they do provide a much greater value over cost ratio, but if you've convinced yourself that blindly for AWS proper as a whole - boy do I feel for you the day you realize the economic advantage they manipulate to monopolize the cloud market, and not for the greater good of their customers.

Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again - his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear. It's laughable that anyone would publicly make that statement at this point in time knowing what we know. Sure, if you're running a static site on S3 for a few users a month I'm sure you've got it covered. For those of us dealing with large scale enterprise everything stated here is, at best, bending the truth and at worst flat out ignorance.

[0] https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

[stillicidious]

> his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear

Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.

Many of Corey's technical posts are around finding sweet technical substitutes for niche use cases, but as I'm sure he'll tell you, 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.

> as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market

Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like. One of the reasons this may not have happened yet is because Cloudflare's whole presentation is consumer oriented, starting with domain configuration management that is hell to version correctly when 20 people have access to the account. Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.

[windexh8er]

> Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.

Nobody is actively encouraging the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought. This makes zero sense. Why would an organization pay a business to reduce their AWS costs if it wasn't worth the cost to realize the savings? Cost optimization is an easy task, as you've stated - so the cost/value proposition of a business like The Duckbill Group must not be worth it according to your statement. Yet they exist and do, seemingly, well. Maybe... Just maybe, cost optimization in AWS is not easy, not straightforward, and designed to be painful enough to where smart engineers are incented to leverage Amazon's dark patterns of hiding costs at time of deployment.

You even state...

> 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.

So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy? Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?

> Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like.

Let's take a stroll back in time. Do you think that Amazon and AWS have always posted a profit? Go look, they've posted many quarterly losses to get where they're at. That's how it works as you build a business like that. To your point - AWS does compete directly with Cloudflare in certain products, yet here we are, Cloudflare and AWS both continue to grow (negative operating income / net income are not a direct correlation of company growth BTW). A mistake you've made is around brand and reputation. Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company. Customers continue to buy Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler and, yes, Cloudflare - even though AWS offers some overlapping portfolio. Why? AWS isn't viewed as a security portfolio. Cloudflare has brand reputation in security and content distribution. And it's a pivot that easily works with both their brand and reputation.

> Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.

This just screams of the competitive argument low-road. I don't have ties to Amazon or AWS. I'm not an employee. When I read statements like this it's affirmation that there's some agenda. I laughed out loud reading that as the closing argument, thanks for that.

[stillicidious]

> So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy?

Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.

> Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?

Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.

> Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company

They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government. CloudFlare on the other hand, to this day, default to MITMing SSL connections for new accounts and downgrading them to cleartext en route to the back end. It seems our perceptions differ wildly.

[ignoramous]

> Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.

You make valid points, but what you're missing is the same accusations you level at Cloudflare were once leveled at AWS (which is why AWS had virtually no credible competition from Y!, MSFT, GOOG for 7 years!).

Also, Cloudflare's moat isn't 0ms cold-starts, but their persistence in commoditising bandwidth. Think Amazon Prime free 2-day shipping and how that worked out...

[windexh8er]

> Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.

I'm sorry, but what are you trying to say? "Antithetical to agile" - is there a point beyond some non-nonsensical, made up scenario? Every major organization with a cloud budget cares about optimization today at some level. This hasn't changed in over 20 years because those budget dollars used to be directed at data center costs. Now they're more fluid and can be more impactful when people make mistakes or aren't making sure to optimize up front.

> Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.

Then share some examples from said "spreadsheets". Because for straight instance pricing DO beats AWS pricing in most every way. This is one of a handful of bread and butter services AWS offers (lift and shift compute). DO also does, most often, better with respect to performance (CPU/compute) when comparing directly [0][1][2][3]. This calculator [4] at DO showcases cost comparisons across all major cloud vendors and I've validated comparison in the last month with AWS - the prices check out.

> They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government.

This is a rather naive comment. I happen to work in the security industry and every cloud vendor has direct ties to 3 letter agencies - that's not at all unique to AWS. Sorry to burst your bubble, but also every notable security player in the industry has similar relationships. It's not unique. It's also more advantageous for the three letter agencies in many of those relationships. Also, AWS, along with everyone else - has relationships in security information sharing for verticals. So, yes, AWS is part of FS-ISAC, as one example. Just. Like. Everyone. Else.

[0] https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_ec2 [1] https://www.bunnyshell.com/blog/aws-google-cloud-azure-digit... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/resources/cloud-performance-rep... [3] https://www.upguard.com/blog/digitalocean-vs-aws [4] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/calculator/

[stillicidious]

> what are you trying to say

I'm saying this is my bread and butter, and I've seen the same pattern in every company I've crossed the doors of. It's no made up scenario when a team of contractors have spent 12 months building out some service, not a single person will have given a damn about costs, so cost optimization is purchased separately. The contractors aren't wrong nor is the business wrong, nor is this pattern unique to cloud spend.

> I happen to work in the security industry

Then surely you will understand how an entire subindustry can exist to mop up after engineers who could otherwise 'simply' avoid most mistakes if they just spent more time Googling.

[slownews45]

"It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how"

If you don't think AWS bandwidth pricing is something in the real world I don't know what to say :) AWS is now broken out in Amazon financials - worth a look to see what they are raking in and the margins they are getting in the real world :)

"Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again"

His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public. For a service like cloudflare (ie, call for pricing / dealing with a salesperson trying to figure out how much they can squeeze you for on upfront or on renewal) this type of service is much harder.

In short, if your bill is too high, you can talk to someone like Corey and they can probably help you bring it down.

[windexh8er]

> If you don't think AWS bandwidth pricing is something in the real world I don't know what to say :) AWS is now broken out in Amazon financials - worth a look to see what they are raking in and the margins they are getting in the real world :)

This comment confirms that you have a misunderstanding of how organizations can and have bought bandwidth via high-cap Internet offerings in the real world given how you've misunderstood my argument completely. My point is that organizations like AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, and many, many organizations around the world still buy Internet connectivity this way (directly). My unchanged statement, all along, has been regarding the egregious margins AWS makes on bandwidth that they charge for in a very asymmetric and oversubscribed manner. It's hard to have an conversation about these things when the basis for how businesses operate aren't understood by those making comments, unfortunately.

> His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public.

I'm not sure how many enterprise agreements you've helped derive or review, but you can get agreed pricing from any cloud vendor - Cloudflare included. If you're spending any amount monthly beyond what appears to be a personal account this is not your issue.