[martinald]

It's absolutely amazing that so many devs don't realise this. They seem to think that bandwidth should cost a few cents a month, when in reality it is virtually free. Perhaps the 7c/GB charge was reasonable when AWS came out 15 years ago, but networking has got orders of magnitude cheaper and faster in the intervening time period.

What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious to anyone doing the math that it can't cost that much, otherwise a 200GB CoD install would be costing the ISP $20.

[api]

I feel like an entire generation of devs have been weirdly brainwashed by cloud to believe that a ton of things need to be very complex and expensive.

Of course it’s also a zero interest rate phenomenon. We are exiting a >10 year era when the name of the game was simply to grow and anything in your way could be dealt with by just throwing money at it. Nobody cared about cost as long as growth numbers went up.

[unclebucknasty]

>it is virtually free

The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle.

So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?

[martinald]

That's why I said 'virtually'.

Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month.

Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.

[unclebucknasty]

>That's why I said 'virtually'.

I hear you, and that is an egregious margin. Just wondering if part of their bandwidth pricing calculation is driven by a goal of constraining their infrastructure costs (or other considerations beyond profit). I'm actually wondering this exactly because it is so egregious.

There is of course a thing wherein if something is free people mindlessly use it. If all AWS customers did this with bandwidth, I wonder how it would impact total usage and AWS's subsequent infrastructure considerations.

I'm no fan of their pricing and I'm sure there's an unhealthy dose of greed in there. Your phrasing just prompted me to consider what other factors might also be involved. And, if part of the rationale is actually to influence customer behavior with disincentives, then by definition there would have to be some pain involved.

[martinald]

No. It's pure margin. OVH and Hertzner et al offer "realistic" bandwidth pricing and they are all fine.

I am almost certain there will be some sort of cartel investigation into this pricing between the big cloud players.

[Aissen]

And at scale, AWS does not pay the HE price. So add another factor 3 to 10 there.

[api]

Yep. Big cloud bandwidth is a 200X markup from list price. Its ludicrous.

It serves two purposes for them. One is obviously a nice profit center. The other is that free ingress but expensive egress causes data to flow in but not out, creating a center of gravity and a form of lock in.

[akira2501]

> when in reality it is virtually free

They're not paying for bandwidth, but their connections are not asymmetric, so they need to balance egress and ingress or they will incur fees or dropped traffic.

The pricing is there to maintain this balance. Since they're obviously egress heavy, it makes sense for them to charge for egress, and make ingress free.

People think AWS is using costs to "tax" you, what they're really doing is using to control the shape and size of their traffic.

[api]

If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine.

Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streaming, game servers, TURN servers, video conferencing relays, etc.

I find it hard to believe that AWS or GCP are getting core Internet bandwidth on worse terms than much smaller companies like Vultr, Hivelocity, Datapacket, or OVH.

I call BS.

[akira2501]

The other companies have significantly different SLAs and drop packets far more readily. They also charge for bandwidth, in my experience, you get your 1TB/mo with your $5 VPS sure, but once you go over, you're facing per/GB charges that are very close to AWS default egress price.

They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "cheap bandwidth" you have to be prepared to run 100s of VMs per provider, and have to consider provisioning VMs you don't need just to get access to another $5 TB of transfer, or you're just going to end up paying the per GB fee anyways.

The terms aren't worse, but the service and their guarantees are different. Again, if you ask AWS for a bandwidth deal, they'll cut you one within a few minutes that will more than halve the price of your transfer if you pay up front. Which is AWSs way of saying, "if you make your usage predictable, we can make it way cheaper."

Why? Because they have fixed _capacity_ on their links. The costs manage that _capacity_.

[api]

Digital Ocean and Vultr are a fraction of AWS pricing. Vultr is $0.01/gb. Bare metal providers are often cheaper still, selling by size of pipe rather than bytes transferred.

In my experience GCP and AWS are pretty unwilling to budge on bandwidth pricing unless you are very large and making a long commitment. If you are not spending six figures a month forget about it.

You may be right about SLA but I run large volume services out of bare metal providers and do not experience meaningful packet loss or down time in practice. Bandwidth costs are easily hundreds of times less than AWS or GCP.

[akira2501]

They'll sell you the pipe without any guarantee and some include provisions that allow them to instantaneously downgrade your pipe if they decide your servers are a traffic management problem.

I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is significant and approaches overage pricing at VPS providers.

I'm sure. If I were running things that were more bandwidth heavy as opposed to integration heavy, we would have gone that route as well, and we would have gone through the extra trouble of getting some provider diversity and redundancy built in.

For smaller cases, they can avoid all that overhead and just trade those into bandwidth costs. Which, if your costs do get high, it's much easier to build an external caching network then it is to build a bunch of external dependent infrastructure with bare metal providers.

In any case, I don't think it's that AWS is taxing it's users unfairly, I think the costs are a solid reflection of where their engineering effort and variable costs are concentrated. It seems like maintaining symmetry in bandwidth is one of those.

As a customer I can use petabytes one month and then zero bytes the next month. They have link agreements with multi year terms and possible "balance payments" required if symmetry is not maintained. This type of bandwidth isn't as cheap to provide under these terms.

[martinald]

Hahahah. I don't even know where to start. If you think a 200x markup from list price on IP transit is a fair reflection of costs from AWS then good luck to you.

[mad182]

Yep. I got over 250TB/month traffic (150TB+ outbound) on Hetzner, and I don't pay anything additional for that, just ~800$ month for 11 servers.

At 7c/GB that would be over 10500$ just for the traffic alone, and probably about the same for the processing power.