The only service AWS hasn't consistently lowered pricing on (unlike almost everything else) is their egress cost. Everyone complains about vendor "lock in" for anything AWS related, and I've never thought so since they've always reduced prices across the board. But egress is the exception. They're keeping pricing high for this exact reason to prevent folks from moving their data elsewhere.
I've got about 25TB of stuff I'd love to keep all in Glacier Deep Archive, but the restore costs are just too insane to justify due to the egress pricing still at .09c after all these years. Too bad.
I view network egress as the primary lock-in mechanism for all of AWS.
If you want to migrate to another provider, network egress costs mean that you'll spend multiples of your normal monthly operating costs to do so. That stifles competition.
But well before that point, most services in AWS have already been built around avoiding network egress wherever possible. You're always going to prefer AWS APIs and services, even if they aren't the best for your use case, because services outside AWS have a network egress tariff placed on them. So you aren't always buying best-of-breed, you're buying the best of what AWS chooses to offer (or the selection of vendors that choose to build in AWS to remain competitive).
And if that isn't good enough, your only other option is to migrate out (and pay those egress costs!).
If you have larger data needs you might look at snowcone -> snowmobile family of solutions. Generally 0.03/GB and scales to 50 petabyte + transfer volumes.
I've actually looked at that before if I was wanting to a large restore if my home nas just totally crashed. .03c is still going to cost like $1000 which still is pretty steep. Mostly because you know these devices aren't being plugged in and the data extracted from s3 over the WAN, they are likely plugged in directly in the datacenter over some insane internal high-speed link.
Yeah, it depends on use case. For business use cases in the event of a big issue / local data loss - $1,000 range might be a rounding error - that's def who they are targeting.
For 40 TB range stuff I've benchmarked some of the free / unlimited options and I'm not sure you could really get data back out and local that efficiently? It's still a week with AWS though as well.
One note - ingress to AWS is free - so if your job model is mostly writing into AWS, with a once every 5 years extract - the overall cost per GB transferred may not be that bad.
rsync.net is 2 cents per GB/month.
AWS glacier and deep glacier are .4 and .1 cents per GB/month.
Free ingress.
40TB on AWS + ingress = $40/month.
A lot of the "outrage" on HN around AWS pricing is not necessarily looking at total costs of solutions AWS offers.
The other things - AWS offers fully transparent pricing.
Even folks like cloudflare - folks say it's an unlimited CDN for $200/month. No it's not.
"Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited."
For business - they like the clarity / simplicity of AWS. For bigger data you can backup locally and have your offsite be AWS - hopefully never to use it or pay the ship out expense.
> Everyone complains about vendor "lock in" for anything AWS related, and I've never thought so since they've always reduced prices across the board.
How would keeping prices high for these services keep people locked in? The whole point of vendor lock in is there is some other indirect cost that you bear by switching, which is why you don't switch.
For AWS, this indirect cost is bandwidth. It is the lock in mechanism.
> How would keeping prices high for these services keep people locked in?
By doing the opposite and raising prices across the board randomly because they know folks can't spend the time and money to migrate without a large support burden or time/money sunk cost.
The only service not going down in price is egress and the only thing I've seen which has been like this, to directly discourage folks from migrating their data to say GCP when their offering(s) look more attractive.
I've got about 25TB of stuff I'd love to keep all in Glacier Deep Archive, but the restore costs are just too insane to justify due to the egress pricing still at .09c after all these years. Too bad.