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Comment by re-thc | Hacker News Reader

> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT

How is the cost of NAT free?

> Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.

I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.

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Presumably they're talking about the egregious price of NAT on AWS.

It's next to free self hosting considering even the crappiest consumer router has hardware accelerated NAT and takes a tiny amount of power. You likely already have the hardware and power since you need routing and potentially other network services

> Presumably they're talking about the egregious price of NAT on AWS.

Maybe. I agree AWS is over-priced. However it shouldn't be "free".

> It's next to free self hosting considering even the crappiest consumer router

That's not the same product / service is it? We're discussing networking products and this "crappiest" consumer router wouldn't even push real world 100m of packets.

salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers

nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this).

sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.

NAT is a stateful network function and incredibly complex to implement efficiently. NAT is never free.

it's already there and fully supported and accelerated by switches and connected hardware, switches like juniper do have licensing fees to use such features, but a company like AWS can surely work around these licensing costs and build an in-house solution.

> it's already there

So it should be free? The bank already has "money". It's already there so you can take it?

That's not how it works.

Do you not get a managed service where someone upgrades it, deals with outages etc? Are those people that work 24/7 free or is it another "already there"?

fair point, but the pricing of NATs is so low that it would actually take more effort to create billing for it than to just have it be free, it's clearly a choice to maximize profits for every single resource regardless of complexity or cost - that is my problem.

And there are things that come for free when you have instrastructure this big and expansive - one-time configuration and you either monetize it or pass down the savings and since every cloud service is in agreement that profits should be maximized you end up with cloud providers which have massive datacenters at very cheap cost due to economies of scale providing it at a value far exceeding normal hosting practices due to their ability to monopolize and spend vasts amount of money onboarding businesses with false promises which errodes the infrastructure for non-cloud solutions and makes cloud providers the only choice for any business as the talent and software ends up going into maintenance mode and/or turns towards higher profitability to keep themselves afloat.

They said “charging more than free” - i.e., more than $0, i.e., they’re not free. It was awkwardly worded.

They said "instead of charging more than free", which means should be free.

Please read it again.

I think we’re in violent agreement, but you were ambiguous about what “cost” meant. It seems you meant “cost of providing NAT” but I interpreted it as “cost to the customer.”

> Please read it again.

There’s no need to be rude.

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