[HN Gopher] AWS free tier data transfer expansion
___________________________________________________________________
AWS free tier data transfer expansion
Author : beheh
Score : 224 points
Date : 2021-11-24 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com)
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| As an AWS user I'm a bit disappointed with this. I was hoping
| their answer would be to cut or eliminated some prices across the
| board vs just increasing the free tier.
|
| I find most apps are pretty binary. Either they are high
| bandwidth (like video and backups) or not. If you use 1TB there
| is a good chance you will use 2TB.
|
| This will certainly make it less likely for the low bandwidth
| users to get a surprise bill but if you're doing video $85 per TB
| will get expensive fast. You better make sure your business model
| can make a profit at those prices. But even then, if the average
| user pays you $20 a month and only streams 100GB of video you
| make money but you'd make more money outside of AWS.
|
| It's almost as if AWS wants to active discourage those use cases.
| rstupek wrote:
| With reinvent coming up next week, we may not have heard the
| last of their response to lowering egress fees
| tfehring wrote:
| Or they want to avoid making pricing more complex than it
| already is, they do that by significantly marking up egress and
| using it to cross-subsidize other stuff (like data ingress and
| internal data transfer), and they've determined that the
| benefit of that simpler pricing to their other users outweighs
| the detriment to users with egress-heavy use cases.
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| I've never operated at Amazons scale so I don't know the
| wholesale costs involved but at least one estimate puts AWS
| margins at bandwidth at 99% [1]. And I'm guessing ingress is
| a fixed cost where they are running nowhere near capacity and
| that is why it is free. That and they want your data on AWS
| so they can charge you for storage and when you download it.
|
| I realize business need to make a profit but I don't think
| AWS is cross-subsidizing. It seems more like there are no
| loss leaders, they make at least 60% margin on all products
| (for users not big enough to negotiate rates). They could
| lower their outbound prices significantly, they just choose
| not to until the market forces them.
|
| Which is smart business. But I think given Cloud Flare's
| pressure here, the market is calling for a more aggressive
| adjustment than just upping the free tier.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/05/how-amazon-web-services-
| make...
| discodave wrote:
| An underestimated chunk of AWSs costs is people. They
| employ >50k people, and likely have a salary bill of
| several billion dollars, a significant portion of revenue.
|
| 50,000 x 250k = 12.5B
|
| Also, they do cross-subsidize, because many AWS services
| are either hardly used (CodePipeline) or free
| (CloudFormation) and the cost to run those services is non-
| negligible.
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| Very good point RE people. Running AWS is expensive, I'm
| sure, but to be clear, I'm not advocating for bandwidth
| to be free. Just that $0.08 per GB is not competitive.
|
| Also, since CloudFormation is a feature that facilitates
| creating more resources that you do pay for I'm not sure
| that is a great example. That is more like saying that
| the other services subsidize the Web Console.
| CloudFormation is not a product in-and-of itself, it is
| more a shared feature that spans product lines.
|
| Code Pipeline is an interesting one in that if it is true
| it's not widely used and costs more money than it makes,
| that's a no brainer: shut it down. But there has got to
| be more to that story why they haven't.
|
| But in any case, with code pipeline there is a clear
| value chain that ends at ECR/EC2/Lambda/etc. My guess --
| and it is just a guess -- would be that someone feels
| pipeline produces more revenue for EC2 (or similar) and
| that covers the cost. Or, simply, they have a path for it
| to be profitable.
| nixgeek wrote:
| It went from 1GB to 100GB, meanwhile Oracle is offering 10TB on
| their Free Tier.
|
| https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
| popotamonga wrote:
| Plus Oracle's egress last time i checked was 10x cheaper.
| terafo wrote:
| They have terrible sign up experience, I'm far from only one
| who hasn't been able to sign up there because of some cryptic
| error. When I've tried to google that, there were reports of
| them requiring using email with full name in it. But changing
| to that didn't help, using different credit/debit cards didn't
| help. But prices are quite nice as far as I can tell from the
| outside.
| napsterbr wrote:
| Same here. My sign-up experience was a nightmare and it took
| 3 weeks (to create an effing account).
|
| I was at a point where I just said "screw this, I don't care
| about the free trial, just give me an account where I'm
| supposed to pay for everything". For some reason you have to
| go through the free trial in order to get a regular account.
|
| I didn't even try out the platform once I got my account.
| They managed to drain all my energy in the sign-up process.
|
| I'd rather go bankrupt by AWS/GCP nefarious egress fees than
| having to deal with Oracle again. Serves me right for giving
| them a shot.
|
| I second the recommendation to stay as far away from Oracle
| as you can, even if their OCI pricing seems incredible.
| ogeiczvm wrote:
| My day to day browser is a hardened Firefox (plenty of
| about:config tweaks, resistfingerprinting, ublock origin,
| temporary containers etc). For signing up to Oracle Cloud I
| used a tmpfs based Chromium browser (ie: completely fresh,
| factory defaults) to avoid issues resulting in my hardened
| browser. Oracle cloud refused to accept my credit card with a
| bogus error message saying something about fraud and/or
| incomplete/incorrect personal details. I searched for the
| error message and someone on a random website mentioned about
| having issues with Chrome and to try Firefox. I found that
| quite unusual as it's usually the other way around but I
| tried using my day-to-day hardened firefox and instantly
| worked and account activated within minutes. Go figure.
| midnightsnow wrote:
| This pretty much sums up my experience. After signing up and
| successfully getting an account then they cancelled the
| account with no explanation. I tried reaching out to them
| through several channels and had to create several more
| accounts just to try and get support. In the end the other
| answer I ever received was "The error you are getting is
| intended." Nothing more was ever said or given and I gave up
| on it ever working.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle
| eatonphil wrote:
| Let's not poo poo actual competition. If Oracle _wants_ to
| compete with AWS that's a pretty good thing for everyone.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Yet signing any contract with Oracle is risky, and i would
| rather pay more than risk dealing with Oracle itself.
|
| but yeah, more competition is always good.
| deegles wrote:
| I _want_ to compete in the Olympics, but whether that
| actually happens is a different question.
| butMyside wrote:
| No let's poo poo Oracle.
|
| I worked there. Engineering is vastly different than
| anywhere else; it's about Oracle; not open source, not
| simplifying software and technology... it truly is about
| daddy Larry being rich enough to afford a fighter jet so he
| has enough to trickle down on the plebs.
|
| Their traditional business side hates the cloud side
| because it's taking over priority; legacy process is
| foisted on greenfield effort. It's a shit show culture by
| MBAs for MBAs.
|
| There is no technical competition or innovation coming out
| of there, just bean counters looking to collect beans.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Plus they hired away a ton of AWS engineers to build their
| competitor right down the street from AWS headquarters. I
| wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| People aren't dismissing the product, they're dismissing
| doing business with Oracle regardless of the product.
| kbenson wrote:
| Yes, it's definitely good if it causes AWS, GCE, Azure, etc
| to increase allowances to compete, even if you (like me)
| plan to never touch that Oracle service with a ten foot
| pole attached to someone else's computer.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| You're not the only one. Almost everyone that did
| significant deals with Oracle at some point has this
| opinion.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Can someone educate me on why Oracle is bad? I don't have
| much experience with dealing with them as a company. Only
| used their database before.
| nijave wrote:
| They tend to have aggressive sales, high degree of lock in,
| and high license costs.
|
| You basically get stuck paying lots for Oracle software and
| that doesn't directly equate to value the software provides
| notacoward wrote:
| They also have _really_ questionable business ethics. At
| one startup, I caught them grabbing an unauthorized copy of
| our customer 's source code when we were on-site at the
| Emerald City to tune it. It wasn't a rogue engineer,
| either; it was an order at least from their manager and
| probably higher. At another startup, we pitched a shared-
| cache idea to take advantage of our hardware. They declined
| to work with us, then included exactly that feature as a
| marquee element of their next major release. Then I worked
| at Red Hat, where anger over their re-badging of RHEL as
| OEL (among other deeds) ran deep. Over and over again,
| they've abused partners and customers and even employees.
| They were the most evil company in the industry before
| Facebook and others even existed.
|
| See also: Bryan Cantrill's "lawnmower" talk about what
| happened to Solaris after the Oracle acquisition.
| https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I've used Oracle Cloud, and it's actually pretty nice and
| well-designed at least from my point of view. It gives the
| AWS Dashboard a run for their money egress fees.
|
| But I still don't run anything important on it or push the
| limits of the free tier. Oracle doesn't have a good
| reputation. Also "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" is literally just
| RHEL rebranded, but it's not a community project and they
| don't like to acknowledge it so it feels particularly
| shameless; especially since they are selling "support" for
| it.
| berns wrote:
| Bear in mind that premier support is included for free for
| cloud customers. So for example ksplice and dtrace are
| included. Ksplice is fantastic and it's really worth it.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Is there a list of cloud providers that have a free tier
| somwhere?
| popotamonga wrote:
| https://free-for.dev/
| mythz wrote:
| Was only a matter of time after their egregious egress fees were
| exposed, 2 Cloudflare posts that help make this happen:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...
| stillicidious wrote:
| I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the
| current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other
| was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers.
| Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service
| with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth
| promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing
| fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewhere of high
| bandwidth users being cajoled into upgrades.
|
| For an honest bandwidth offer, I'd much sooner consider Fly.io
| rather than Cloudflare. At least with Fly their true pricing is
| transparent
|
| edit: speaking of transparency, https://imgur.com/HnlWFUe
| ignoramous wrote:
| We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache
| (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.
|
| Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher
| TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform,
| has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS'
| value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as
| trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing
| but nightmare to parse or estimate. This is in stark contrast
| to the simple and straight-forward pricing with Cloudflare,
| which we pretty much prefer as a small dev shop. So much so
| that we choose to pay Cloudflare money to host our services
| even though we've got 5-digit AWS$ credits.
| stillicidious wrote:
| The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely
| free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. In my
| experience it always makes sense to consider the latter. At
| some point that $595/mo. you're saving will appear on a
| lead sheet, whether it happens today or (similar to e.g.
| Google Apps) after 5 years. Also like Google, they're a
| public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like
| every company before them to the realities of reporting
| growth.
|
| I'd always prefer paying for certainty than design a
| solution built on a lottery.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > The question is whether what you're receiving is
| genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing
| budget.
|
| Using any "free" service is generally not free as you
| scale. That's the freemium model we live in today.
|
| > Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and
| will eventually succumb like every company before them to
| the realities of reporting growth.
|
| This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to go on
| at this point. There is no more certainty with AWS, as
| implied in your statement, than with any other cloud
| provider. Not all organizations have an end goal in being
| the scale of AWS. And not all organizations put profit
| over product with respect to an outdated perspective that
| said organizations need to grow 40% YoY for all of
| eternity to be successful. It's now, more than ever, very
| clear that AWS profit margins on data transfer are
| egregious and they spin the backpedal as "Oh - look at us
| dropping prices, for you, our esteemed customer!". This
| is the real marketing slight of hand here, not the other
| way around.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS
| prices would actually give examples.
|
| I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and
| "unlimited" offerings to never believe them.
|
| On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to
| reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period.
|
| So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
|
| Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps
| API customers etc). AWS does not have that history.
|
| Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really
| annoying thing. Seriously, put a porn site up online with
| cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS
| prices would actually give examples.
|
| There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing.
| Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant
| difference of meaning with those words.
|
| Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn.
|
| > So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
|
| I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that
| there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other
| major cloud provider with respect to your statement about
| public companies who "eventually succumb like every
| company before them to the realities of reporting
| growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your
| own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly
| following the logic.
|
| > Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really
| annoying thing.
|
| At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even
| serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret
| pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be
| aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The
| Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the
| context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses.
|
| > Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare
| and see how far "free" gets you.
|
| I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to
| imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper
| capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong
| doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill
| conceived at best. Or is your logic just that you can't
| do this on Cloudflare and that's the root of your
| argument on why AWS is better? Again, I'm not exactly
| following your train of thought.
|
| [0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-compelling-
| economics-...
| slownews45 wrote:
| 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.
| georgyo wrote:
| Google Apps is likely a poor example of your point. All
| the people who were using the free tier were never forced
| to paid plans.
|
| I'm still using free tier Google Apps in multiple places,
| even though they haven't offered new free accounts for
| about ten years now. They even still let you create new
| users for free in these legacy GApps.
|
| Interestingly, I would likely migrate off of GApps to a
| different paid service if Google changed their minds,
| however I don't think they have a strong incentive to
| apply pressure here at long as Gmail.com accounts are
| free.
| rstephenson2 wrote:
| $0.035/GB sounds about an order of magnitude too high once
| you get to a large scale, were these clients doing small
| amounts of bandwidth?
|
| On the other hand, $0.0021/GB is far on the cheaper end of
| the spectrum, who is it that offers something that low?
|
| Agreed all around that the pricing is frustratingly opaque.
| maxclark wrote:
| I can confirm these $s
| technobabbler wrote:
| Interesting. Can you be more specific? Is it possible those
| prices are conflating different services, e.g. CDN vs network
| tunnels vs video streaming vs workers vs Pages vs object
| storage egress?
|
| Even within just the CDN category, Cloudflare does a lot with
| its basic CDN offering (bot blocking, transformations,
| dynamic caching, etc.) that other vendors may charge as
| separate options.
|
| That's not to say I don't believe you, I just wanted to make
| sure it's apples to apples.
|
| Cloudflare's pricing model only really makes sense, IMO, if
| you're either a small/med business (which makes it an
| incredible deal) or if you're working cloud-native using
| their edge functions (workers, pages, etc.). If you're
| primarily using them to shield and proxy a LAMP monolith or
| similar for a large number of users, yeah, I can see how that
| would get expensive really quickly. There are other vendors
| who specialize only in that, being a dumb CDN. Cloudflare's
| value is that they enable completely new architectures based
| on their network topology... you can't easily do something
| like that on Fastly, for example.
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| We're talking about AWS though and AWS if you do < 10TB is
| 0.085 per GB from CloudFront. So CloudFlare is still much
| cheaper in that case.
|
| fly.io looks interesting, though, never heard of them.
| floatboth wrote:
| ~~The "100GB is actually only 1GB per region" thing is some
| sneaky stuff :/~~ Good move on CloudFront though.
| satyrnein wrote:
| I think you misread, it says [emphasis added]:
|
| >100 GB of data per month (up _from_ 1 GB per region)
| floatboth wrote:
| Ohh. *facepalm* Yeah that's way better.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Looks like R2 was a punch in the gut for Amazon.
| [deleted]
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sure, all the caveats from _muh capitalism_ and _muh free market_
| still apply ...
|
| But,
|
| This is THE textbook example on how competition pushes innovation
| forward and drives prices down.
|
| Thank you, Cloudflare!
| Epskampie wrote:
| AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign
| up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you
| go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of
| HN for example, you might be majorly screwed.
|
| It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit
| is reached.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Also the AWS free tier expires after 12 months (unlike, say,
| GCP).
| Androider wrote:
| AWS has both 12 months free tiers for some services, as well
| as pretty generous always-free offerings, like the data
| transfer announcement today. The 1TB/mo CloudFront traffic is
| now always free, as is the 100GB/mo of data per month from
| AWS regions to the Internet.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/free/
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Yup, this is one of several reasons I just pay the $5/mo for a
| similarly specced VPS with another provider.
| chrsig wrote:
| i don't think you'll find much sympathy for the free thing not
| being good enough
|
| it's pretty reasonable for them to ask for a CC -- making it
| too easy to get free compute/bandwidth is opening the door wide
| for abuse.
|
| ..but yeah, everyone wishes they'd have a sane way to halt
| services if over budget.
| tjoff wrote:
| The solution is to not use AWS. Is is not a sacrifice to not
| engage with shady companies.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Paying for what you use, the peak of shady business
| practices!
| onion2k wrote:
| Paying for what _your users_ use, with no way to say no to
| the traffic, is exactly why billion dollar companies like
| Cloudflare exist - to protect people from "paying for what
| you use".
|
| So yes, it is shady not to protect customers from that IMO.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That's really disingenuous.
|
| The complaint here is that Amazon offers a free tier
| supposedly for learning the platform, but it is a giant
| footgun that shoots a ton of people in the foot.
|
| People are reasonably asking for hard limits to protect
| them from this highly foreseeable situation wherein a
| complicated cloud offering can go on a spending runaway.
|
| It is literally as easy as following a beginner tutorial
| and selecting the database instance the tutorial uses and
| leaving it running. That could be a several hundred dollar
| mistake.
| aborsy wrote:
| I think I set an alert recently on AWS emailing me if I
| surpass a limit that I set.
|
| Have you checked out AWS console recently?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That's been a feature since AWS started. That isn't at
| all what I am talking about above.
| staticassertion wrote:
| "Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary
| footgun as well, and one that could impact larger
| customers.
|
| I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're
| using AWS you're taking on some responsibility to make
| sure you're not blowing up your bill. AFAIK you are
| automatically enrolled in emails that will tell you when
| you're about to exit a free tier limit, so it's not like
| they won't warn you.
| the8472 wrote:
| > "Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary
| footgun as well, and one that could impact larger
| customers.
|
| Then make it opt-in but a highly visible one during
| account creation so that people who just want to test can
| enable it.
| jffry wrote:
| Nobody is suggesting to make that the default uniformly
| across all AWS accounts.
|
| It would be excellent for anybody intending to use the
| free tier for its stated purpose (getting to know the AWS
| platform) who would like to make the _choice_ to shut off
| their services if they are going to exceed the free tier
| quotas.
|
| That way you are free to experiment, and if you blow up
| something while learning, you're not then leaning on the
| mercy of AWS support to refund you.
| nostrebored wrote:
| The free tier is not just for getting to know the AWS
| platform. I worked with customers hosting the entirety of
| their early applications on free tier services.
|
| Playing around turns into production.
|
| When your service goes down and you lose $XXXXXX revenue
| suddenly it's AWS's problem. AWS has taken the approach
| that keeps the lights on, assuming its customers
| understand their unit economics.
| jffry wrote:
| Right there at the top of https://aws.amazon.com/free/ is
| this: AWS Free Tier Gain free,
| hands-on experience with the AWS platform, products, and
| services
|
| Just because you've worked with customers hosting in the
| free tier doesn't mean that all free tier users would or
| should choose to prioritize uptime over cost.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Um. They'd much rather deal with a waiver request from
| someone for $100 then to deal with a bad credit card in
| accounting spinning down a major account.
|
| BTW - I've never heard of the later happening at AWS ever,
| and I have at other hosting providers.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think AWS's billing system is robust enough for that.
| In pure AWS fashion you have to create a billing alarm, which
| pushed an event to SNS which triggers a lambda to shut down
| your stuff but it is possible. The catch is that billing
| metrics are estimates and alarms might be delayed.
| nijave wrote:
| Yup, seems like they have a lot "eventually consistent" batch
| processing going on. Certain things like CloudTrail have 4-6
| hour lags in billing (unless it's improved in the last year)
|
| It'd be a huge engineering effort to make something
| instantaneous--I think the closest thing they have to such a
| system is whatever they use for rate limiting or IAM.
|
| I'm guessing there's a pretty high overhead to trying to do
| realtime instead of batching
|
| AWS oopsies suck but I think their billing system is pretty
| robust compared to lots of usage based billing systems (like,
| say, utilities)
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| I think AWS drastically needs to create some type of "sandbox
| account" flag that severely locks down the services you can use
| and the amount you can scale up, exactly for reasons like you
| said.
|
| However, I also think a big problem is that many people on the
| internet and especially people who try to sell AWS tutorials or
| learning courses push AWS as some toy that every developer
| should sign up for on a whim without understanding what they
| are doing. An AWS account is an industrial-grade tool, it's not
| a toy, and it should be treated as such. It's like renting a
| backhoe when you don't even know how to use a shovel yet, and
| then being surprised when you completely screw up your yard.
|
| Sites like acloudguru that offer ephemeral sandbox AWS accounts
| are becoming more popular, and people new to AWS should really
| be steered towards those.
| nanidin wrote:
| It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC
| you can set budget alerts so you're notified once a threshold
| is crossed. It's not a perfect solution, but if you expect to
| spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and
| goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.
| bachmeier wrote:
| And if you get in a car accident and don't check your email
| for a few days? It's extremely hard to understand how a
| company with their resources is able to send a notification
| but not able to shut it off if that's what the customer
| wants.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Its not hard to understand at all, they willingly screw
| over customers, just look at all the posters here falling
| all over themselves to excuse this blatantly shitty
| customer hostile behavior.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Well they're two different problems. For AWS to give you an
| alert a service X needs to send billing data to the billing
| system.
|
| For the billing system to then "turn off" X it needs a
| number of things.
|
| 1. It needs the ability to reach back out to that service.
| It probably has no idea what it is, all the billing system
| is likely to receive is something like:
| {service_name: "X", action: "Put"}
|
| ie: Pretty opaque data with just enough structure to know
| "This costs X cents and happened Y times".
|
| So now your billing system needs to be able to resolve "X"
| back to some AWS resource that it can talk to. Both the
| resolution of X as well as the "billing can now talk to
| every single AWS service" are pretty heavy lifts.
|
| 2. It needs to know what "off" is. "Off" for S3 could mean
| a lot of things.
|
| a) Delete the bucket and all data inside of it
|
| b) Keep the bucket but delete all data inside of it
|
| c) Keep the bucket and the data but disable API access
|
| etc etc. Do you disable PUT? GET? Both? What if what's
| blowing up your billing is GET?
|
| And this really doesn't get easier for other systems. Do
| you back up a database before killing it? That incurs
| charges too.
|
| I don't see AWS somehow solving this in a "one size fits
| all" way because there isn't one.
| agiamas wrote:
| Admittedly, all of these are real issues. The thing is
| that for a company with 1.816 trillion (1816 billion!)
| market cap as of today, all of these issues are easily
| solvable. But it's not a matter of "we can't solve it" or
| even "we don't have the resources to do it, there is some
| higher priority problem to tackle first".
|
| It's not an engineering problem at all at its heart.
|
| It's a marketing/business problem that someone somewhere
| is thinking that Amazon can provide a free service to X
| users, knowing that Y (X, Y positive, Y << X) users will
| go over their "free tier" usage and pay for all X's
| costs, maybe even more, making the free tier a profitable
| business on its own.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > It's not an engineering problem at all at its heart.
|
| My point is that it is definitely an engineering problem
| as well as a product problem.
|
| a) It's going to be super technically difficult to build
| (especially in a way where it's responsive at a granular
| basis to handle huge blow-up bursts)
|
| b) It's not even clear what you're supposed to be
| building
|
| None of what people are proposing is well defined or easy
| to build.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| An alert is not a cap. They should add a cap to just shut
| down/delete resources if the cap is hit.
| belter wrote:
| You can use Budgets Actions for that:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-
| management/...
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still
| incur charges before the budget action kicks in and
| terminates your resources.
| belter wrote:
| True. But you can do it on forecasted costs.
| orf wrote:
| Ok so how would this work in any other way?
|
| Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges()
| and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()`
| statement in it's critical path? No, of course not.
| Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be
| delayed.
|
| But then you run into an issue: what if you end up
| costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in.
| Should you not pay that? Why not?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Should _every_ S3 action have a `if
| will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges():
| raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?
|
| We're talking about one account-wide flag
| `has_exceeded_billing_limits`. Changes are infrequent,
| and can be pushed into caches. Small overruns while the
| flag pushes are trivially eaten by AWS.
| slownews45 wrote:
| You claim that a bunch of GPU crypto minors won't exploit
| a chance to incur billing overruns if amazon waives
| charges?
|
| The amazon deal is simple. Very clear pricing for pay
| what you use.
|
| Cloudflare - can you link to the page where they show the
| cost of bandwidth? Still waiting.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a business decision on AWS's part. If they want to
| reduce cognitive load or objection of some customers,
| they'll be more willing to "eat it".
|
| My strong guess is if you had a free account, setup a
| budget cap, went over it, and they decided to charge
| you*, a quick email to support would get it waived.
|
| I'm very much a fan of AWS, in part because while they
| have the chance to uphold the legal terms, my experience
| is that they're pretty customer friendly.
|
| * Early on, I had many bills under $1/mo that they just
| comped without me having to do anything.
| luhn wrote:
| > Should _every_ S3 action have a `if
| will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges():
| raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?
|
| Budget actions work by applying an Deny All to IAM, which
| has essentially exactly that.
|
| The problem is not the shutting down, it's the detection.
| AWS billing has a resolution measured in hours, which has
| limited usefulness on a platform where you can rack up
| thousands of dollars in charges in just a few minutes.
| dfinninger wrote:
| Yes, you can set up a budget alert. I have it set up for one
| of my work accounts. Problem with that is that it's an email,
| and there's usually some delay in it going out. It's not a
| great solution for accidental traffic spikes (surprise HN
| post, or someone finding and abusing a public S3 object you
| have hosted, etc).
|
| So you get an email saying your $10/mo site is now $1000 for
| this month, and climbing.
|
| In general I wouldn't recommend using AWS and expecting the
| free tier for anything that's going to be public facing or
| autoscaling.
| onion2k wrote:
| _It's not a perfect solution_
|
| It's not a solution at all given the fact the alerting
| process can lag behind the logging process by several hours
| or more. If you've hit a traffic spike it could have rolled
| over your site and gone in that time, leaving you with a bug
| bill.
|
| Alerts are not a viable solution to traffic spikes unless
| they're real-time and absolutely bulletproof. AWS's alerting
| is neither.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet is now free for
| up to 100 GB of data per month (up from 1 GB per region)._
|
| Is it 100 GB per region or 100 GB across regions? Because it
| sounds like the latter.
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| I read it as total. But that's still a good sized increase.
| Especially if most of your traffic comes out of 1 or 2 regions.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet
|
| This only applies to the free tier, which you age out of after a
| year. Who even cares? Or am I misreading this?
|
| They can do a lot better than this.
|
| edit: It appears that the regional transfer doesn't age out
| either, even though it isn't explicitly stated in this post
| (whereas they did state so for Cloudfront).
| beheh wrote:
| > Data Transfer from Amazon CloudFront is now free for up to 1
| TB of data per month (up from 50 GB), and is no longer limited
| to the first 12 months after signup.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Right, that's why I quoted the other section.
| beheh wrote:
| My bad, I thought you were quoting the article title. I see
| it's been cleared up in other replies now.
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| You're misreading it. Only some parts of the free tier "age
| out". Other parts of the free tier are free forever (it's
| really stupidly confusing). The things announced in this
| announcement are free forever.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Thanks, that wasn't clear to me. I'll edit my post.
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| It's stupidly confusing because the regional transfer of
| 1GB free per month isn't technically part of the "Free
| Tier" as advertised on this page [0], it's just part of the
| normal egress pricing model of the individual services [1]
| [2]. So I guess really this announcement post is
| misleading/confusing because the regional transfer increase
| is just a change in the normal pricing model, not the "Free
| Tier"... but really that's just semantics. AWS really needs
| to fix the "Free Tier" to make it less confusing.
|
| 0: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
|
| 1: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
|
| 2: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
| staticassertion wrote:
| Thanks, really appreciate the detail. Edited my post.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not everything in the free tier expires after 12 months. Some
| remain always free.
|
| Even now you should be getting 1 GB of free out traffic on your
| older-than-12-months AWS account.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I found it very unclear because the next section explicitly
| states that, in the case of Cloudfront traffic, it _won 't_
| age out. But they don't make that statement about the
| regional traffic.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm guessing that's because the regional traffic never aged
| out before.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Get 'em Cloudflare. :muscle:
| jhack wrote:
| Wonder is Backblaze will follow suit. They're part of the
| bandwidth alliance with Cloudflare and that's great, but if
| you're using B2 for personal use and want to get data from a
| private bucket, you're still paying $0.01/GB egress after the
| first gigabyte.
| fasteo wrote:
| Thanks Cloudflare
| satyrnein wrote:
| I guess every little bit helps, but 100 GB/mo * $0.09/GB = $9/mo
| of savings. That's nice for a hobby project, but it seems utterly
| negligible for any actual business.
| ElbertF wrote:
| The CloudFront savings add up to about $100/mo. Still pretty
| negligible.
| ksec wrote:
| 1TB / month CDN usage for Free ? Ignoring Cloudflare, I am not
| aware of any other CDN that offer anything similar.
|
| Although their pricing [1] after the first 1TB is still very
| expensive.
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3
| busymom0 wrote:
| > CloudFront Function
|
| Is this similar to cloudflare workers?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to
| fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over
| that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or
| whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that.
|
| With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification
| and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be
| a default feature. It should be a default feature for all cloud
| providers.
|
| I'm literally using them less because this isn't a feature they
| offer. Even the free tier of AWS is too risky without hard
| limits.
| MMS21 wrote:
| Hetzner
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| I think the closest you can get is using a VPS like
| DigitalOcean where you pay $X for a server and there's no
| autoscaling to worry about. But even with those, if you go over
| the bandwidth limit (although with DO the bandwidth limit is a
| lot higher) you would be charged more.
|
| The unfortunate reality is that hobby developers that just want
| to pay $20/month aren't the target audience for GCP etc. They
| don't really care if you're using them less for your personal
| hobby projects. They target large enterprises, and those large
| enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap
| my spend at $20".
|
| Even as an AWS employee, I sometimes use non-AWS hosting
| providers for my own projects. Even outside of the billing
| situation, AWS is often too complicated for my use cases. It's
| just not targeted at me and my hobby development projects.
|
| disclaimer: am AWS employee but the above is my own opinion and
| not official position of the company, etc etc.
| thayne wrote:
| > and those large enterprises would have very little use for
| something like "cap my spend at $20".
|
| For the enterprise as a whole, probably not. But it would
| still be useful to be able to create sandbox accounts for
| experimentation with a hard limit on spend. Or give
| developers their own cloud accounts to run development and
| testing infrastructure that they can control, without having
| to worry about them accidentally spending way too much.
| AstroDogCatcher wrote:
| +1 to this; also an AWS employee, also use other VPS
| providers for personal projects (Hetzner and Vultr). Don't
| need the full breadth of AWS services to tinker with Caddy
| and Tailscale, but more than that I simply follow the
| practice of "don't shit where you eat".
| philsnow wrote:
| Maybe not the kind of "cloud provider" you're thinking about
| but tarsnap works on a prepaid basis. You top up your account
| and it debits that account daily. You get warnings when you go
| in the red. Super simple.
| nijave wrote:
| Woah woah woah we're bashing AWS here :)
|
| Imo hard spend limit is a pretty complicated thing to implement
| and billing has historically been very batch based
| JoshWVS wrote:
| Not a full "cloud provider" per se, but you might want to check
| out NearlyFreeSpeech.net[0]. It's fully pay as you go--"If your
| balance runs out, your web site hosting suspends
| automatically."
|
| (I should note that I haven't used them myself, I'm just
| impressed by their website/business model.)
|
| [0]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
| kam wrote:
| Backblaze B2 has separate hard spending limits for storage,
| bandwidth, and requests, which is an elegant solution to the
| "but what happens to your data if you hit the limit?"
| objections you often see in these threads.
| tfehring wrote:
| Edit: On second thought this is probably a bad idea, but I'm
| leaving my original comment below for posterity.
|
| Probably easiest to generate a virtual card number with a spend
| limit, off the top of my head I know Capital One offers this,
| Apple will also generate virtual card numbers though I don't
| know if you can set a spend limit on them.
| pxx wrote:
| This just stops them from easily charging you. It doesn't
| change your liability.
| tfehring wrote:
| Yeah good point, I was thinking they'd cut your service off
| but on second thought that's probably not the case.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Digital Ocean could be interesting. Used to AWS and Azure but
| DO is doing great too
| saidmasoud wrote:
| Interesting timing given https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-
| aws-managed-nat-gatew... just came out. Does this also apply to
| NAT Gateways?
| jabo wrote:
| Wonder if CloudFlare's post had anything to do with this:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
| marsouin wrote:
| Well if that isn't a direct answer to
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ ...
| orasis wrote:
| My thought as well. I was just about to spin up a new service
| on cloudflare and now I'll stick with AWS.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| AWS giving you 95GB egress for free is not at all a direct
| answer to the insane prices
| Hamuko wrote:
| Just because it isn't as good doesn't mean it's not a direct
| answer. This is basically the lowest hanging fruit response
| AWS can give against Cloudflare to convince people not to
| migrate over.
|
| Maybe the idea is that if you're doing 1+ TB of CloudFront
| traffic, you're already deeply locked into AWS anyways and
| less willing to make the jump anyways.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| 1GB of egress costs about 9 cents.
|
| The cost savings is equivalent to ~$9/mo in standard US
| regions. Nobody is going to migrate clouds over a $9/mo
| saving.
|
| If we're talking about CloudFront that comes out to $85.
| That's actually a pretty good savings, but it's distinct
| from egress. CloudFront's pricing isn't locking customers
| in due to egress pricing because it's a CDN, not a data
| storage service.
| tyingq wrote:
| A partial direct answer that's still less free egress than
| almost every other free tier and/or sub $5/VPS. And as far as I
| can tell, the egregious pricing is still there once you're past
| the free limit.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| :thinking face
| mh- wrote:
| Lol, thanks on behalf of everyone enjoying the AWS free tier,
| jgc.
| Guest19023892 wrote:
| I use 500GB - 1TB per month on Cloudfront, costing about
| $50-100 per month, and I was going to move this over to
| Cloudflare to take advantage of their savings. However, this
| AWS change will basically wipe out my entire Cloudfront bill. I
| should send Cloudflare a Christmas card to say thanks.
| tyingq wrote:
| It leaves you pretty close to the edge of paying 8.5+
| cents/GB when you go over though.
| neeraga wrote:
| Good job Cloudflare
| gigatexal wrote:
| Thank you Cloudflare!
| ignoramous wrote:
| Nothing on Lightsail CDN and Object Store egress?
| aborsy wrote:
| The egregious AWS egress fees have made AWS practically useless
| for all but enterprise customers.
|
| Who would pay 100$ for backup test or recovery with S3?
| Androider wrote:
| Literally any tech company paying US engineering salaries? Try
| to calculate what a bay area engineer makes hourly sometimes,
| then go ahead and flip that AWS cross-region data replication
| checkbox (and maybe make your S3 bucket immutable too, storage
| is cheap), then tell your boss that you just saved the company
| a whole bunch of money compared to your team cobbling together
| some janky bespoke backup solution that nobody will remember
| how or if it works 12 months from now.
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(page generated 2021-11-24 23:01 UTC)