Links:
AWS’s Egregious Egress: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they’re calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you’ve come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you’re using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They’re also available now in the AWS marketplace if you’d prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: Hi there. Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn from the Duckbill Group here to more or less rant for a minute about something it’s been annoying the heck out of me for a while, as anyone who follows me on Twitter or subscribes to the lastweekinaws.com newsletter, or passes me in a crowded elevator will attest to, and that is AWS’s data transfer story.Back on July 23rd—of 2021, for those listening to this in future years—CloudFlare did a blog post titled AWS’s Egregious Egress, and that was co-authored by Matthew Prince—CloudFlare’s CEO—and Nitin Rao—who is one of their employees. Presumably. That was somewhat unclear—and it effectively tears down the obnoxious—and I mean deeply obnoxious—level of AWS data transfer pricing for egress to the outside world.And there’s a bunch of things to unpack in this blog post, where they wind up comparing AWS pricing to the wholesale bandwidth market. And they go into a whole depth for those who aren’t aware of how bandwidth is generally charged for. And the markups that they come up with for AWS are, in many cases, almost 8,000%, which is just ludicrous, in some respects, because—spoiler—every year, give or take, the wholesale cost of network bandwidth winds up dropping by about 10%, give or take. And the math that they’ve done that I’m too lazy to check, says that in effect, given that they don’t tend to reduce egress bandwidth pricing, basically ever, while the wholesale market has dropped 93%, what we pay AWS hasn’t. And that’s obnoxious.They also talk—rather extensively—about how ingress is generally free. Now, there’s a whole list of reasons that this could be true, but let’s face it, when you’re viewing bandwidth into AWS as being free, you start to think of it that way of, “Oh, it’s bandwidth, how expensive could it possibly be?” But when you see data coming out and it charges you through the nose, you start to think that it’s purely predatory. So, it already starts off with customers not feeling super great about this. Then diving into it, of course; they’re pushing for the whole bandwidth alliance that CloudFlare spun up, and good for them; that’s great.They have a bunch of other providers willing to play games with them and partner. Cool, I get it. It’s a sales pitch. They’re trying to more or less bully Amazon into doing the right thing here, in some ways. Great, not my actual point.My problem is that it’s not just that data transfer is expensive in AWS land, but it’s also inscrutable because, ignoring for a second what it costs to send things to the outside world, it’s more obnoxious trying to figure out what it costs to send things inside of AWS. It ranges anywhere from free to very much not free. If you have a private subnet that’s talking to something in the public subnet that needs to go through a managed NAT gateway, whatever your transfer price is going to be has four and a half cents per gigabyte added on to it with no price breaks for volume. So, it’s very easy to wind up accidentally having som