There are 3 pricing models for S3, the 3rd one (glacier) having 3 sub-pricing models to be chosen at time of requests.
I don't think you realize how insanely complex the entire S3 pricing model once you get out of the "standard price".
Maybe I just have too much empathy for my poor devs and ops who try to understand how much what they're doing is gonna cost them. It's only one full page, both sided, of text after all.
Is that really that much different than hard drives? No hard drive manufacturer uses the same standards to determine how much space there will actually be on the disk. You can get hard drives that spin at many different RPMs. You can get hard drives with many different connector types. Drives with different numbers of platters. An 8TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive is not going to have the same seek time as a 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive.
There are so many combinations of hard drives that will result in different performance for different situations all with different costs. Then you start talking about cold storage as well and you've moved into other media formats.
Just because there is a page worth of a pricing model doesn't mean AWS or any cloud provider is doing anything incorrectly. You're paying for on demand X and engineers who are going to utilize that should understand it as well as they would understand how to build an appropriate storage solution of their own. On demand just means now they don't have to take the time to design, implement and operate it themselves.
I'm not saying that S3 isn't complicated, or that the pricing model, even after the changes, isn't nuts.
I'm saying that anyone who thinks this is more complicated than it was does not understand just how crazy glacier pricing was before. Three static glacier pricing tiers is a lot better than the previously system which is so complex that earlier versions of the AWS pricing page just gave up and called it "free".
(Briefly: The old Glacier model's pricing wasn't based around data transfer, but on your automatically retroactively provisioned data transfer capacity based on your peak data transfer rate, billed on a sliding scale as if you'd maintained that rate for the entire month. There's probably a less intuitive way to bill people for downloading data, but if so I've never seen it. It was a system seemingly designed to prevent users from knowing what any given retrieval would cost.)
I don't think you realize how insanely complex the entire S3 pricing model once you get out of the "standard price".
Maybe I just have too much empathy for my poor devs and ops who try to understand how much what they're doing is gonna cost them. It's only one full page, both sided, of text after all.