[Twirrim]

Having worked for storage services for the cloud, it's not a massive premium. Things are kept pretty close to costs. We have to, it's a similar race to the bottom case. Each time one of the clouds drop storage costs, the others rapidly follow even to the point of it losing them money while they figure out how they might return to profitability.

The biggest cost for cloud storage services is not disks. Never has been. They're pretty cheap all things told. It's the per rack operational costs that dwarf them. The cost of electricity, cooling etc. You're also paying for the durability and accessibility that is built in to the software. It's why you see, e.g. backblaze obsessing about their server specifications and how many disks they can cram in to the server. Everyone is trying to maximise the rack data density, and trying to tow a really fine line on having just enough compute power in the individual server.

[dilyevsky]

Durability and accessibility is solved problem using erasure coding with automatic recovery. Nothing interesting in this space going on for like 10 years unless you’re pushing planetscale storage.

> It's the per rack operational costs that dwarf them. The cost of electricity, cooling etc

Ok lets do some simple math - lets say you have a few racks with 50PB in there, colocated. Power + floor space + remote hands will not cost you more to than 250k/y and that’s being very generous. Dividing by 50PB thats .5c per gig PER YEAR. Can you explain why GCS/S3 charges 50x that not including egress which is also ridiculous?

[mtnGoat]

Have you seen their private rate cards for this level of buying? I bet if you had your calculus would change here.

Also, it’s easy to beat most costs if you get consumer grade hardware and don’t refresh it more than once a decade. I see that often when folks compare costs, but that’s dishonest and just kind of shoots their credibility in the foot.

[dilyevsky]

Note that we haven’t even started discussing hw costs - tp correctly noted that amortized capex is less than the opex. It doesn’t change the math that much. I had pulled the relevant quotes to make a google sheets model and even with top line hardware i couldn’t stretch the break-even point beyond 2 years.

Private rates are cool except they come with strings attached and even discounted 90% its still not even close to break even on decent sized commits. Purely on costs the cloud cant win whichever way you slice it.

[mtnGoat]

So you’ve never actually had to acquire hardware or run systems at this scale? You’re just doing this on some Google sheets?

[sciencesama]

And securely provision it and access it