[timewizard]

> At what point does it become more costly and complicated to store your data on S3 versus just maintaining a server with RAID disks somewhere?

It's more costly immediately. S3 storage prices are above what you would pay even for triply redundant media and you have to pay for data transfer at a very high rate to both send and receive data to the public internet.

It's far less complicated though. You just create a bucket and you're off to the races. Since the S3 API endpoints are all public there's not even a delay for spinning up the infrastructure.

Where S3 shines for me is two things. Automatic lifecycle management. Objects can be moved in between storage classes based on the age of the object and even automatically deleted after expiration. The second is S3 events which are also _durable_ and make S3 into an actual appliance instead of just a convenient key/value store.

[snoman]

Care to elaborate? What you’re saying doesn’t match my experience.

I’ve paid pennies a year to store data in s3 for the better part of 5 years. Can’t even buy a hdd with what I’ve spent on s3.

[timewizard]

The per GB price on S3 is higher than on bulk HDDs. This is easily observed. What you are saying is your data storage needs don't even justify a single HDD. This is a scaling issue and not a pricing issue.

[snoman]

Oh, so “it’s more costly immediately” actually meant “it’s more costly once you’re storing over some threshold of data.” Ok. I can get behind that.

I don’t think it’s so easily observed at scale though, because at that point it’s hardly just the hdd cost anymore. It’s the hdd, server/compute, cabling, cooling, power, facilities, security, cabling, maintenance.

The TCO of data storage isn't just the drive - it just so happens that it’s still less than the cost of a drive up to some threshold. I don’t know if anyone having done a full cost model comparison. Everything I’ve ever seen assumes the data center is free.