AWS announces 85% price reductions for S3 Express One Zone | Hacker News Reader

AWS announces 85% price reductions for S3 Express One Zone

aws.amazon.com

27 pointspanrobo15 comments

Significant reductions for "fast S3", however the base capacity pricing is still very high at $110/TB/month. That is as expensive as EBS io2 which is much much faster in terms of latency.

Yup. I plugged the numbers in just to check it out and for our very busy service, the storage costs eat up the savings from the reduced GET and PUT pricing. For us, express is still 8x more expensive.

We're pursuing Fsx NetApp ONTAP to store the objects in the short term in our processing pipeline. Unfortunately, we may need to build our own lifecycle management component if we go that route.

Why would anyone use Netapp over Qumulo in AWS? AFAIK, Qumulo is much less expensive and has better performance if you have a lot of data.

I'll have to look into that. We heavily bias towards AWS offered managed services. We have a massive enterprise support contract and we use it. We're almost always going to look for something AWS can provide directly as long as it meets the requirements.

So in what scenario would one use S3 Express One zone rather than EB io2.

Don’t you get global HA with S3?

actually, the S3 Express One zone - as the name indicates - is not global HA, but single zone. So questioning it over fast block storage like io2 or simplyblock is actually valid. It is just matter of s3 interface over a block interface.

"In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent, and these charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB"

It's not clear but are there cases where this could be a significant price rise? If you exclusively had small objects (<512kb) being written and read then this could add up quickly.

If all your GET requests are 512KB in response, this "price reduction" is effectively a price raising. GET requests go up to $0.000323 per 1K from $0.0002 per 1K.

The article states a new price of $0.00003 /1k requests, an order of magnitude lower than your indication. Maybe you have miscounted the number of zeroes, or did I miss something in the calculation?

Before this change, 1000 512KB GET requests cost $0.0002 ($2e-4).

After this change, 1000 512KB GET requests cost $0.00003 + $0.0006 / 1024*3 * 512 * 1024 * 1000 = $0.00003 ($3e-5) + $0.00029296875 (2.93e-4, dominates the cost) = $0.00032296875, so roughly $0.0003 ($3e-4).

It's because before this change all data transfer charge was waived as long as requests are smaller than 512KB.

The announcement did mention it explicitly, but it tried to downplay it, by starting the sentence with a price reduction:

> In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent, and these charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB.

This "and" should be a "BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT".

Why would anyone pay the crazy high AWS prices?

Do startups still use AWS?

I’m assuming these days AWS is just fleecing the big companies who feel like there’s only one option.

> I’m assuming these days AWS is just fleecing the big companies who feel like there’s only one option.

My employer is a customer at a scale that AWS calls us strategic industry or something. Some years ago, the young engineer in me was all hyped about the range of serverless, managed services being very accessible in one place. Piecing together those resources felt very unixy. I bought into the coolness so much, I could hardly believe such tech was actually used in my industry.

I could've known better all along. Any of our solutions would work just as fine in an open-source stack. And in the bigger picture -I moved to a platform-focused role- it doesn't even matter that much. Two-thirds of our consumption is 24x7 EC2 on-demand. For sure, many projects in the company are wasting a lot by simply holding it wrong. But even if not, we're also left wondering

> Why would anyone pay the crazy high AWS prices?

and decided to do something about that.

I guess it was seldom used. There are some pricing anomalies all over aws offering.

I recently tried to use their IPAM and was amazed by the outrageous cost.

IPAM is insane. BYOIP requires IPAM. This makes things even more insane - if you want to manage any BYOIP addresses you need to enable IPAM for all IP addresses (not just BYOIP) in an account.

We tried this at a previous job to manage a pair of /24s and it ended up requiring us to manage _hundreds of thousands_ of rfc1918 IP addresses in IPAM, which cost us something like tens of thousands of dollars per month.

For a pair of /24s.

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