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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I'm up for AWS bashing more often than not, but I don't get what this post is proposing. Should AWS overcharge for the RDS traffic that is handled differently than generic customer connections? Or should they do deep packet inspection on all traffic to pick out MySQL replication streams and bill them at lower rate because... reasons? Or something else?

What does the better version of this situation look like?

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It isn't a coincidence that they take their margins on bandwidth instead of compute. Makes you do the computations locally at AWS instead of sending it to some other datacenter.

The better version that will never happen is that AWS makes their margin evenly on all purchases. But that wont happen since by pricing bandwidth so highly encourages people to do everything at AWS instead of sending data between providers.

Why do you think they make huge profit on bandwidth. Larger customers all have PPA agreements with very large discounts. Smaller customers get the benefit of a stellar network with elasticity in the Tibps plus range for a small $/GiB fee.

> Smaller customers get the benefit of a stellar network with elasticity in the Tibps plus range for a small $/GiB fee.

Are you AWS sales? This seems unrelated to the discussion to me.

> Why do you think they make huge profit on bandwidth.

Because I have a rough idea of what bandwidth costs me at a data center, I can make some conservative extrapolations for their economies of scale, and I can read the AWS price page.

(I have also negotiated discounted bandwidth fees for AWS, and while they can be substantial, AWS is not going hungry.)

Compared to pricing of non-cloud providers, I'm sure AWS also takes their margin on compute. It might be a magnitude less than for bandwidth, but it's still there.

Even compared to cloud providers AWS charges more for compute.

Security groups and NACLs are free. The way I see it, the margins on things that are easy to measure pay for things that would drive bad behavior if the margin was applied evenly.

> I'm up for AWS bashing more often than not, but I don't get what this post is proposing.

The discussion topic is about anticompetitive practices.

AWS charges a premium on intra-region traffic, when other cloud providers do not. The thesis is that these arbitrary charges are designed to force users to consume their managed services which further leads to vendor lock-in.

Can these arbitrary intra-region traffic charges be interpreted as anticompetitive practices? I believe there's a good case to be made. Don't you agree?

The traffic between AZs is probably being priced anticompetitively and they should reduce that cost. It is very likely marked up enormously over the cost of the circuits.

RDS traffic that is handled differently than generic customer connections

Is this documented anywhere? I would assume it's handled the same.

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