Do you expect their annual turnover to go up? They might get a bigger slize of the pie but the pie itself is getting smaller.
Pre trade AMZN was down 7%
EU always had stricter safety standards for table saws. I moved to the US in the late 90s, sold my table saw in the UK and got a new one in the US. It lacked the quick stop feature that my UK saw had.
That makes this whole SawStop thing so confusing to me. I'm sure some fingers are lost in Europe by table saws, but that doesn't seem to be anywhere near the 'must mandate auto-breaking saw tech' level.
What kind of ai stuff would you like to do? There are indeed few with as many integrations but individually there are open source variants out there and specialised products.
This extension does a good job of removing them from your subscription feed. If you like me, guard your feed since you don't want to watch random stuff from the home page this is the only way to not totally clutter the feed with random shorts thumbnails. The very fact you can not disable shorts from your feed is outrageous, but obviously not surprising.
You have made three statements and not a single one express any sympathy with their situation. Only your own victimhood and one blanket statement you don't support the government. Their employees are being shelled with cluster bombs by your government as we speak.
I think it is time you face reality that the world is going to start to hold the Russian people accountable for their governments actions. I feel sympathy with the Russian people since many don't support this war or even their government but at some point they are going to have to get uncomfortable and take risks and stand up to the government.
From the day 1 I publicly made a statement on my Fb and LinkedIn and offered relocation help for Russian and Ukrainian people.
And as I’ve said earlier, I don’t live in Russia, I don’t support “my” government and their actions.
There are thousands of Russians who got into jail for the protests.
How dare you blame people just because of the place they were born?
This whole situation is a tragedy. I don't know your life story and base my comments on the tone of your replies in this thread.
The world is going to hold the Russian population accountable to some degree for the war their government have started whether you think this is fair or not. And I think your attitude of aggression, victimhood and being wronged is not going to help you in the coming years. You would probably be better served with some humility, empathy and feel of responsibility even if you think it is unjust. The real victims are the Ukrainian civilians being bombed by your government at the moment. Not inconvenienced Russians who feel they are unjustly punished.
You don't know my life story but you accused me for supporting the war; you don't know all Russians, but labelled all the people just by nationality. How different are you from nazis blaming Jewish for being Jewish?
Just simple test: I have 3-5 reachouts every day for relocation help from Ukraine and Russia. I will say them: "Hey, danols from HN told me that I'm russian therefore I should support the war. please contact to him". Are you ready to take responsibility for them and help them all?
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UPD: I wrote this in emotions, I'm sorry. But I'm truly offended by your accusation
This will be my last reply. I am not accusing you personally for what is happening. I empathies with your situation and feel sorry for you. You are obviously doing what you can at the moment. What I was trying to convey was that the tone of your replies came of as pretty aggressive with a sense of injustice and victimhood. Which considering the situation didn't sit well with me.
My replies also comes from emotions and anger. It is probably unfair but being Russian I think you are going to have to find ways of dealing with these emotions from other people even if you feel it is unjust. Expressing empathy and humility would probably be helpful. Especially during the current time when bombs are still falling. I didn't get that feeling from you and therefore reacted the way I did, which was probably unnecessary. I wish you the best in dealing with this situation and hope that you are able to help Russia become a free & open society.
I don't understand how it is possible in a functioning market economy to have 8000% markup on a utility product like bandwidth. Seems more like an oligopoly where a few big actors with a big moat has agreed to keep prices inflated. How can a sustained 8000% markup for a product like bandwidth not be considered price fixing?
Because AWS doesn’t actually want to collect the egress fees. They want you to avoid egress entirely for high-value services, which has all kinds of excellent implications for AWS:
Third party SaaS offerings that move large amounts of data are effectively forced to host in AWS.
Want a small number of high-value servers (e.g. big GPUs, etc) in your own data center or colo to use for non-availability-critical purposes integrated with the rest of your AWS stack? You’d better price in egress!
Want to gradually transition to a competing cloud? Good luck, egress will bankrupt you before you finish the transition.
amluto is spot on. AWS don't want to make money off of egress, they want to make it non-viable to move anything out of AWS that isn't being served to an end consumer.
I wonder, if you made a video streaming app on top of AWS you could negotiate a significant reduction of fees, since you're not ruining their business by transferring out valuable data to competitors.
And if that's the case, I wonder if that constitutes a breach of net neutrality in practice, since in practice, a major part of bandwidth costs will depend on what kind of information you are transferring.
My suspicion is that not even Netflix gets the egress out of AWS at commodity market rate. The vast majority of traffic will be handled by their own CDN
Netflix doesn't pay anything for egress of video because it doesn't serve any video from AWS.
As for everything else, AWS offers tiered pricing for everyone and it's the same for everyone. They just don't publish the tiers at that level, but yes, Netflix pays less than you probably do because they're in the higher tier -- but they pay the same as all the other companies at that tier.
> Want to gradually transition to a competing cloud? Good luck, egress will bankrupt you before you finish the transition.
They do offer the Snowball to lower transfer out cost, they also offer Direct Connect which is more convenient and can be cheaper.
For sure it won't be cheap, but being able to transfer 100 TB for less than 3k isn't too bad. Storing that on S3 would cost you nearly that per month... if you can't spare a month of cost to migrate, you may want to rethink your pricing.
The Cloudflare blog post really only looks at wholesale cost of bandwidth and compares it to the price AWS charges. But I think it's missing a huge component of all of the magic that happens inside AWS between those two things.
I've seen some of the inner workings of the big cloud providers' networking stacks. The networking infrastructure, the software that runs it, the software that exposes it to customers, the thousands of engineers working at any given moment in AWS/GCP/Azure's NOCs to maintain uptime are truly some of the most impressive technical marvels I have ever seen. They aren't as sexy to discuss on HN as something like the managed containers services, functions as a service, EC2 etc, but the networking stacks like the VPC, NAT gateways, subnet routing, privatelinks, security groups, ENIs, nitro cards, etc are pure magic as far as I'm concerned and are so so so much more complicated than a standard data center's networking stack, or even Cloudflare's stack.
To use Cloudflare's "bucket of water" metaphor, AWS isn't even close to just being a dumb bucket of water that you fill with water and then get charged to take out the water. There is so much that happens inside of that bucket to segment your water into different pipes, routing your water in all kinds of customer-customizable ways for many different use cases, mixing/heating/cooling your water as you need, all while guaranteeing things like making sure your water arrives exactly where it is supposed to arrive and doesn't get contaminated or leaked along the way.
Does AWS make a big markup on bandwidth? Yea, surely they do. But is it as simple as Cloudflare says it is? Not even close.
Yes, their network stacks are definitely complex and cost a lot to maintain, I'm sure. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good deal if the customer isn't able to derive enough additional value from all that complexity. In fact it makes the offering less attractive if the complexity isn't sufficiently abstracted away and distract from product work or if their abstractions are leaky.
Recently I've been working with https://fly.io/ for a new app and it's a breath of fresh air compared to working with the big cloud providers. They offer simple but robust networking primitives built on top of ipv6 and WireGuard and provide a ton of value add on top like global distribution & load balancing, service discovery, TLS termination, all of which just work exactly like I'd expect it to, out of the box without any configuration on my side.
I'm watching fly.io with interest, I want to see how they handle the first major incidents - response time, lessons learnt, transparency before I trust them with a production site though. Most SRE skills related to your own operations are all learnt on the battlefield and not via some cliche must-read book from Google engineers afaic.
If its Linode style - delayed status page updates - sometimes as much as 15minutes, zero detail post-mortems - this problem has been fixed by our engineers thank you yada yada, and same issues repeat six months down the line then I will be understandably disappointed.
They also update their status page pretty diligently whenever something goes wrong even for things that don't necessarily impact all customers (the only recent item on there that affected my app directly was the Oct 13 one from what I can remember): https://status.flyio.net/history
> But that doesn't necessarily make it a good deal if the customer isn't able to derive enough additional value from all that complexity.
It’s simply obvious that it’s not a good deal if you’re not their target customer with a use case they cater to. However, it could be a good deal if you have a relevant use case. Unless it’s being suggested that AWS caters to everyone in all cases then it adds nothing to the conversation to point it out.
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud gives you 20TB bandwidth for €3.49/mo VMs, which I've essentially regarded as Hetzner gives unlimited free bandwidth for all servers.
Being lynched for egregious egress fees is only something I've experienced when using mega corp's clouds, where economies of scale suggests their vastly larger size should allow them to provide even better value.
But that's in a normal market, not the artificial lock-in mega cloud corps enjoy where they're able to distort customer behavior from artificially high pricing.
I'm a Hetzner home user and a huge fan, but let's not compare the quality of networking you get for free from them with the networking you get from AWS.
I don't think I've seen a latency spike on AWS in 10 years. Hetzner, it's often possible to observe latency and drops over 10 minutes (and the situation hasn't changed much in about 10 years)
In all the years I've used Hetzner I've never observed these random 10 minute latency drops you speak of. They've always had much faster internet access then I've ever been able to get from my home broadband so I'll even SSH into & use them for network intensive dev tasks like iterating on a new Docker container since it's able to download & build the image packages in a fraction of the time.
The primary issue I have with them is latency access to their DE/FI data centers from the US, if their US DC offered dedicated servers I would be migrating to over to use them instead.
They launched Cloud in the US this month, very likely dedicated will be offered soon enough. The bang for buck on Hetzner is insane, really love them, but have and would rip them out of any business environment I come across, largely due to network quality and attitude to support.
If you haven't experienced Google translating insistently German responses from one of their DC techs you probably haven't been using them for long enough ;)
As for networking, would encourage installing something like Smokeping
I've needed to access their tech support 1 time when my HDD failed and a couple of times for new SSL certs before LetsEncrypt, who were always responsive and supportive. Don't see how derogatory characterizations of their DC techs is in anyway necessary.
But I don't really access AWS support either, when something doesn't work I've just killed the VM and started a new one. It's less disposable with bare metal servers, I can physically restart the server from their control panel or if issues are not fixable, reset the server with a new Linux OS image, which granted would be a lot more time consuming.
I will add that whilst I'm not in the business of dictating which cloud services business customers would use, I'd agree that I would recommend AWS over Hetzner who are a) paying for & would have to administer it themselves and b) is going to have access to all the managed services they would ever need in future.
I would still recommend they consider Hetzner for any high-resources intensive workloads where their raw compute is vastly less expensive. I'll also chose the cheaper reoccurring cost over convenience when I'm able to self-service it myself.
Hetzner has its network hiccups sometimes, but AWS quality may be a joke if you really care about latency tails and even median under any significant load. I didn't analyze the networking itself, but - you run in a VM and share host machine with other clients VMs - you just can't get stable latencies this way. It's night and day when you migrate to baremetal Hetzner and observe how latencies change.
(Again - it's about dedicated baremetal - I know nothing about Hetzner's cloud)
It's not really that much magic. It's just a variation of EVPN-VXLAN plus smart NICs that segments and directs the traffic. Then they have normal VM hosts or nowadays devices with ASICs that handle the GW and NAT functionality.
Custom ASICs (Nitro chips) aren't magic? Maybe so, but they cost money to develop.
All of the other networking stuff ( Security Groups, NACLs, flow logs, VPCs, subnets, etc.) you don't directly pay for, isn't magic either, but also cost money.
Nitro is just a fancy converged host adapter with Smart NIC functionality. It's unclear to the industry how much of Nitro is custom, and how much of it is existing IP that is cobbled together (e.g. Graviton and the ARM Neoverse cores).
The ASICs are on the fabric doing the routing and NAT for all the traffic in the AZ. These ASIC are unlikely to be custom. Hyperscale operators typically use open networking hardware with merchant silicon. You can get open networking hardware to do all sorts of packet manipulation, and these devices are a cheaper than traditional manufacturers, but more powerful as they expose more low-level interfaces.
All those features you talk about are implemented from features that are provided by these hardware platforms.
AWS is just putting an managed service together from them, no different to how they take postgres, do some tweaks and rebrand it as an AWS service.
The thing about a competitive market is that it requires that cost of switching is low. The higher the cost of switching, the more leverage the company has over you.
SaaS and cloud providers in particular have a lot of leverage over their customers due to the typically high cost of switching. E.g. what does it cost to move your whole infrastructure to a new cloud? They can basically gouge you up to that cost threshold.
These cost of switching actually leads to a market that is not competitive in the traditional sense. Yes, competition on the surface, but monopoly within.
It's true that gouging can't be as egregious as a true monopoly environment, but certainly much higher than a low cost of switching environment.
The big tell is margins. Anytime a company can sustain excessively high margins, it's usually a tell that theres a lack of a competitive market. A lot of software companies get high margins either by being first to market (by many years), or leveraging high cost of switching.
Despite software being cheap to deliver, it's also cheap for your competitors to deliver, so margins should be low in a highly competitive market, regardless of marginal cost of production.
I do believe new regulation is needed to handle these business models such that we can continue to foster a competitive environment. It would have to be very carefully crafted to prevent unintended second order effects of course.
Because bandwidth isn't the only AWS product, but you can't buy bandwidth for cheap from XYZ Inc. and connect that to your AWS account. That's not technically possible, you have to buy it from AWS.
So instead of using the cheapest vendor, companies use AWS for a ton of reasons (broad support, everyone knows how to work with it so it makes recruiting easier, hundreds of features, etc...) and their high bandwidth bill is worth it.
AWS is a luxury product and the outbound charge is the delivery fee. You will also find that the delivery fee for a Louis Vuitton bag is more than for a pizza.
The egress is a way to snare a lot of extra margin.
It's 100% clear that orgs. wanting to host large public platforms will have 'major concerns' over this pricing issue but that's not their target market.
I'll bet most HNeers are thinking in terms of 'Hosting my App' there vs. AWS Bread and Butter is mostly hosting corporate IT services, which is a different thing.
This is like going to a supermarket and complaining that the plastic bags for you to store your shopping in cost 10 cents which is a 8000% markup, as if plastic bags are why you're in a supermarket
Its not 8000% on a markup on raw metered bandwidth, they're serving data from a service they operate. Comparing acting like they're just "marking up" bandwidth is an unfair comparison.
What do you mean, how is it possible? That's how markets work. You open a booth in the market, and you can ask any price you want. You can ask for a nickle or a million bucks. There's no rule about how much money you can ask for.
As for your assertion that there's a price fixing conspiracy, who do you imagine they're colluding with? What other company do you find charging these prices?
The parent comment misunderstands that most of Amazon's customers are very clearly not extremely concerned about the bandwidth costs (even if they'd all happily receive a lower bandwidth bill from AWS). They're not there for the cheap bandwidth. That's the central flaw in the parent's bafflement about markets, they did a exceptionally flat appraisal of the AWS value proposition, as though AWS isn't a gigantic business of many dozens of service offerings which act as a customer magnet and retention mechanism.
And many customers simply are not doing petabytes per month.
AWS wasn't meant to support Netflix type loads, those guys will build their own CDN's. For everyone else who wants security groups (totally for free) when some other firewall vendors would charge a small fortune to provision 1Gbps capacity for these types of services... they are fine with the price.
The other issue cloudflare doesn't understand is the bandwidth pricing they quote is for capacity (ie, 10Gbps). AWS has to have enough capacity to serve the peak, but the customer only has to pay for data used. I'm sure at low points the data is free, but maintaining the black friday / superbowl capacity is expensive, so you are paying a premium for that too.
Urm, Netflix is BUILT ON AWS (or at least was 5yr ago):
> Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
1) $50/TB is not insane pricing relatively. I used to pay something like $3/GB (way back) which would be $3,000/TB. There are still plenty of folks charging high rates.
2) $50/TB may not be a big part of some customers bills. If it is on cloudfront you drop to 0.02/GB or $20/TB for larger volumes.
3) AWS doesn't charge separately for some services that wrap around networking. Their nitro instances have a pretty good networking story.
4) Especially with this new free tier on cloudfront, a fair number of users will never hit 1TB per month (free) data.
But that's apples and oranges... With AWS you get VPCs, Security Groups, NACLs, flow logs, DDoS protection (limited), public IPv4s, custom hardware to make sure you can actually use the 10/40/100Gbps pipe on your server, etc. etc. for "free" ( you only pay for those via bandwidth). The best most bare metal providers have is a firewall(security groups), and that's it.
I can get all the things you stated, including "unlimited" bandwidth for a few bucks a month if I just rent a VPS. I never understood the flocking to AWS. Does nobody like running a server anymore?
BTW you don't need to "run your own server" per se on the bare metal or VPS providers. You can auto-provision with Terraform, run Kubernetes or Nomad/Consul, etc. You have to do some work to set up your templates and the environment you will use but once it's created you can stamp out copies of it endlessly.
There are cases where AWS et. al. make sense. The bottom line is that you need to do your own spreadsheets modeling your own workload and compare costs. Include extra labor for managing your own stuff and compare it to the added costs of AWS.
What you'll often find is that AWS and such are cheaper at a small to medium scale and DIY becomes cheaper (sometimes radically so) at larger scale.
I don't like being bound to a particular machine (including indirectly via a VM) and having to manually intervene if something goes wrong with that machine. AWS auto scaling, and the equivalent feature from the other big cloud providers, frees me from that.
Just as an example: Hetzner's dedicated servers, which start around US$30/month, come with unlimited 1gbit connections (really unlimited, not "unlimited until we decide to throttle you").
If you max out that connection non-stop, you can push about 330 TB/month. The same amount of bandwidth from EC2 would cost roughly US$20,000.
Most are unlimited. But the ones where you have an actual bandwidth cap, it comes out at less than $5/TB (if we're including the machine itself), the bandwidth itself, probably less than $1/TB
Some bare metal providers have allocation based on server provisioning rather than specific egress limits. But CloudFront is cheaper with commit pricing because CF commit pricing is very very cheap and you have to factor in the cost of said reverse proxy nodes and only so much can be delivered per node. As you factor in management of the nodes it becomes even more favorable to the hyper scaler like CloudFront.
I have seen large scale deals where CloudFront comes in cheaper than what the smaller CDNs built on bare mantel can reasonably offer even with sizable commits.
The U.S. is the modern & real life version of the emperor has no clothes. It will be a grim day when the majority of the population wakes up and has no choice but to accept this reality.
This argument is getting old for B2B products. Would you mind sharing a list of Google Cloud Products or even just Business to Business related products that have been shut down?
App Maker, Google Cloud Print, Google Hangouts, Hire by Google, Fabric, Google Station, Google Correlate, Google Translator Toolkit, Google Fusion Tables, G Suite Training, Hangouts on Air, Google Cloud Messaging, Inbox by Google, Google URL Shortener, Google Realtime API, Google Site Search, Google Spaces, Picasa, Google Checkout.
I got bored and stopped before finishing 2012, but you can go back and find more.
App Maker is probably the worse on that killedbygoogle.com copy & paste list. Rest are B2B really?, the product evolved and got re-branded/consolidated or meh, was it really widely used anyway? Not a single one is a Google Cloud product.
I am no Google fanboy and get frustrated by a lot of things they do. But I think the Google kills everything argument for B2B products is getting tiresome. Especially in a Google Cloud Platform context.
Their actions on the Google Maps API absurd price hike and the recent GKE pricing structure change debacle is a whole other story and worth a lot of criticism.
I absolutely consider the rest of the best to be B2B. Some of them are also used by consumers (in the same way that many products are both B2B and B2C), but all of those products have business use cases. Whether it was "widely used anyways" is a different argument and a bit of a shift in the goalposts.
There are literally zero GCP products in that list. (Despite the unfortunate naming, both Cloud Print and Messaging predate GCP and have nothing to do with it.)
GCP has been around for a fraction of the time of Google as a company. It is perfectly valid to have at least some concern here as Google as a company has a long track record of shutting down products. Conversely, it is tenuous at best to use the argument that since GCP has never shutdown a product that they won’t given how many of their products were launched very recently.
Yes, that argument has been made ad nauseam, but the previous poster was asking specifically for GCP products that have been shut down -- and the response doesn't seem to contain any.
Has nothing to do with killing B2B products. But I share your frustration and distrust in them for those two changes.
With the Google Maps API price change they demonstrated that they are very capable & willing of abusing their market position with shocking price hikes and with the GKE structural price change that they are no longer interested in the trust & business from small & medium size companies and unless you are enterprise size you can expect unpleasant price changes going forward.
“Starting with the Python 3 runtime, the App Engine standard environment no longer includes bundled App Engine services such as Memcache and Task Queues. Instead, Google Cloud provides standalone products that are equivalent to most of the bundled services in the Python 2 runtime. For the bundled services that are not available as separate products in Google Cloud, such as image processing, search, and messaging, you can use third-party providers or other workarounds as suggested in this migration guide.
Removing the bundled App Engine services enables the Python 3 runtime to support a fully idiomatic Python development experience. In the Python 3 runtime, you write a standard Python app that is fully portable and can run in any standard Python environment, including App Engine.”
Python2 itself has been sunset, and Python3 the language is not compatible. It doesn't seem outrageous to me to require developers to use a new SDK if they want to migrate their apps to Python3 -- and that's optional too, since Python2 remains supported on GAE.
That's not the issue. I would have expected them to migrate their libraries to python3 (like every other major python library in the world). Instead they wrote entirely new libraries that aren't remotely the same, requiring a more or less rewrite of our app.
Is there anyone but me who uses the premium article on medium.com as a filter for what is NOT worth my time?
I believe in the tech space the majority of readers who write in depth worth to read articles are not incentivised by a few dollars kickback from their hard work from medium.com. They often write it for personal profile enhancement or company blog marketing reasons and want to reach maximum audience and will keep it free for all.
The problem nowadays though is that medium.com is often able to trick them by making the article premium through deceptive ui even when that is not their intention. Just look at the googlecloud medium blog and you constantly see premium articles there which seems bizarre.
> Is there anyone but me who uses the premium article on medium.com as a filter for what is NOT worth my time?
I humbly suggest that your filter might be broken.
After years of being irritated by Medium's pay wall and reflexively clicking away from blockaded articles, I recently decided to pay the $5, because there was some article I really wanted to read (can't even remember what it was), and because I was tired of paying the mental tax of constantly weighing whether to click on a Medium link because I didn't know if the article would be paywalled or not.
I've since read dozens of high-quality, in-depth articles on a variety of technical topics and other areas of interest.
I find it well worth $5/month and I'll probably continue to subscribe.
