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> I wonder what explains AWS' high egress costs, though.

Vendor lock-in. It prevents people from otherwise picking the best provider for the task at hand - for example using some managed AWS services, but keeping the bulk of your compute on-prem or at a (much cheaper) bare-metal host.

It makes sense, but I wish there was an option to opt-out, as to allow high-bandwidth applications that are fully on AWS (at the moment AWS is a non-starter for many of those even if you have no intention of using AWS competitors like in the scenario above).

Maybe they should just price end-user egress vs competitor egress differently (datacenter and business provider IPs are priced like now, but consumer-grade provider IPs are much cheaper/free)? That would discourage provider-hopping, while making AWS a viable provider even for high-bandwidth applications such as serving or proxying media.




Unpopular opinion: There are a lot of free networking products, and it probably makes sense to hide all that in the margins of a few products (egress, NAT gateways) rather than penny pinch every API.


Even one cent per gigabyte would pay for so much of that stuff.

If subsidizing the networking products would require a 10x or higher markup on egress, then that is not the correct way to organize prices.


I've migrated stuff away from AWS. It's not hard, and AWS doesn't make it hard to do.

Egress costs are where AWS makes money. You can get around that by negotiating lower cloudfront costs then basically exfiltrating your data via cloudfront. We were getting < .01/gb pricing (.0071?) for only like a $2k/mo commitment.


Explanation makes sense, except cross availability zone traffic is also expensive and by this logic it should not be.


It’s presumably expensive because there’s a lot less inter-AZ bandwidth than there is intra-AZ bandwidth for the obvious reasons.


But if that's the case, this could be the reason of egress cost. I mean egress cannot be cheaper for aws than cross az. So if we assume that this is just expensive then we should assume the same for egress


IIRC some cross az traffic uses vendors' fiber (albeit definitely encrypted) but I could be completely wrong.


DirectConnect pricing might be cheaper, if a company is really trying to get stuff out, but I haven't run the numbers to determine if the connection charge plus DTO (data transfer out) would save money over regular S3 egress charges. see https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/




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