It is very cheap insurance for knowing with virtual certainty that your data exists. Egress is expensive ($100/TB last I checked), but in the target use - backups of last resort - I will be very glad to pay that to have my data back. And if all goes right I'll never pay it.
Personally I find ordinary S3 far too expensive to justify. Not so with Deep Archive.
Note, I work for AWS. Opinions are my own.
Assuming they never have increased a price in 15 years, that doesn't prevent them from doing so, but it's a confidence inspiring track record.
I have about as much confidence that AWS won't raise prices on existing services/features as I do that Google will eventually kill another good project - https://killedbygoogle.com/
I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.
Of course AWS needs to make money.
Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices.
Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise.
Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022.
You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?
I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up
(I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)
As for a fair price, I think Cloudflare and BackBlaze provide S3 API compatible services with better pricing. Cloudflare doesn't charge for egress at all. This lends substance to their claim that AWS is overcharging for egress.
My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets a price, I expect that's pretty close to the minimum sustainable price, because they've spent a lot of effort on that.
B2 currently charges $5/TB/mo with lots of options for bandwidth that's too cheap to meter. This strikes me as pretty fair overall.
But the bandwidth is a huge issue.
[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...
And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway.
> I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.
Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.