Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.
Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one.
If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.
IANAL, but I don't believe stating a price has any impact on whether it is anticompetitive or not. If the behavior is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter if other people do it too and state their price as well.
Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios.
If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiting a provider's cloud, to any other network location, on an operational basis, it is actively discouraging exiting the provider's services creating a kind of price barrier that could be cost prohibitive for operational inter-networking.
Operational inter-networking, to me, encourages competition not discourages it.
For example, perhaps I want to use Microsoft Azure's Data Factory to move data from AWS S3 to Redshift. It is not possible as far as I know without egress from AWS to Microsoft's network, and then back again. But surely these clouds are connected with peering relationships making the cost of ingress/egress negligible, so why is this not allowed? That would allow users of the cloud to freely mix and match services from among many clouds.
The world I see today does not seem to encourage such competition.
Wow, I hadn't seen this. This is quite cool. So clearly somebody else at Cloudflare saw the same concern I do and came up with a creative solution. Interesting that AWS isn't playing though.
One factor could be while of course they are peered it might be paid peering or if they allowed the traffic unmetered it would upset other free peering arrangements due to subsequent asymmetrical transfer rates.
I thought anticompetitive behavior was the exact opposite of price gouging. You sell below cost to put your competitors out of business. Evidently AWS isn't doing that with bandwidth.
AWS bandwidth fees make a multi-cloud infra a less likely design or migration choice by their customers, leading to lock-in.
> Service providers may attempt to “lock in” customers to prevent them from switching to alternative products, technologies, or suppliers. Customer lock-in involves raising customers’ switching costs to the point that the cost of switching outweighs the potential benefits from switching.
Egress is expensive, therefore you're less likely to use other cheaper cloud vendors to host some part of your infra and keep everything inside aws network (as internal aws bandwidth is free even halfway across the world). Also if you have huge amount of data, moving them out of aws into another cloud would net you a hefty bandwidth bills so you're less likely to consider moving.
the best form of competition will be simpler distributed compute, with the ability to more seamlessly process workloads across end user device, edge compute and cloud.
of course, AWS will play there too, but doesn't mean the overall ratios won't tilt towards the edge (although plenty of data "left" for the clouds since overall data will continue to grow).
Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value.
And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them everysingletime AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.
Wait, are you saying it’s grossly unjust to criticize the pricing of Amazon’s cloud product?
Just to be clear: Amazon is not paying a variable cost for how many bits are transferred over their wires. And the standard, prior to cloud, and still in colocation, was to charge for capacity (i.e. $/gbps) rather than transfer (i.e $/gb). They are making massive, massive profits by this pricing arrangement. The cost of sustaining 100 gbps transfer for 30 days on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than paying for one month of 100 gbps of IP transit.
They’ve normalized a pricing structure that is disconnected from any actual cost basis. You’re free to pay for it, but it’s quite amusing to say criticizing that is unjust.
Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose. Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).
> Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers
To be fair, that's how all products are priced in general: production cost defines the lower bound and what customers are willing to pay defines the upper bound, and the goal is to maximize what the customer pays.
The theory is that as time goes on, the prices moves from what the market will bear to become closer to the cost of production. When this does not happen, it is a failure of the market.
The grandparent's argument is that AWS is extorting the customer to remain a customer by making the cost of moving data out of AWS prohibitevly high. I don't think it is actual extortion (at least legally), since the egress prices are public, and you could argue if the customer had done due diligence they would have known the price when becoming a customer in the first place.
But if they had changed the price after a customer became sufficiently invested in AWS, that would be using "unfair means", to obtain the customer's continued business.
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150 15 definitions retrieved
151 "Extortion" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48"
Extortion \Ex*tor"tion\, n. [F. extorsion.]
1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting
anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any
undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Law) The offense committed by an officer who corruptly
claims and takes, as his fee, money, or other thing of
value, that is not due, or more than is due, or before it
is due. --Abbott.
[1913 Webster]
3. That which is extorted or exacted by force.
Syn: Oppression; rapacity; exaction; overcharge.
[1913 Webster]
.
151 "extortion" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
extortion
n 1: an exorbitant charge
2: unjust exaction (as by the misuse of authority); "the
extortion by dishonest officials of fees for performing their
sworn duty"
3: the felonious act of extorting money (as by threats of
violence)
.
Terms are commonly used metaphorically to show the speaker considers a given situation to resemble that term qualitatively but not exactly. Very commonly. Like, it's practically fundamental to our communication.
