Thread by @QuinnyPig

Credit to @houlihan_rick; he's not entirely wrong. For *most* customers, data transfer pricing falls within a reasonable, expected band.

For a relatively small percentage of customers, this doesn't hold true.

The problem is that it's impenetrable and unpredictable.

https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick/status/1367844529806655495

It's an embarrassment to @awscloud's data transfer pricing both that I had to create this chart, and that I have to refer to it so frequently.

"Pricing reflects our costs" and other lies providers tell me.

Sending data into AWS from the internet is (generally) *FREE*.

Sending data out of AWS costs (generally) more than storing that data in S3 for 3 full months.

The way everyone finds out what data transfer is going to cost them is they run a workload and find out through experience.

This is a problem for discoverability, for predicting the costs of a workload, and for understanding how to structure for cost.

I'd rather understand that there's a cost consequence for things talking same AZ vs. cross-AZ and structure for that in my architecture when I build it, not have to retrofit that in later.

And then you squint at the corner cases and start asking hard questions. "Why is it more expensive to send data from one AZ to another in the same region than it is to send that same data from Virginia to Ohio?"

It's arcane, and bizarre, and it's a service you basically can't opt out of. You can get full line rate between basically any two points within AWS and that's damned near magic. But many workloads don't care about speed, they care about price.

In my datacenter I don't have to know the answer to things like "how many gigabytes do my application servers send to my database servers every month."

If my company values pricing predictability over lowering the price (many do!) then staying on-prem is the right move!

Let's be very clear here--Netflix didn't build their OpenConnect program for funsies (openconnect.netflix.com/en/). They (and anyone who wants to do streaming video at scale) are failed by AWS's data transfer pricing.

These are hard problems, and there aren't easy answers.

But I didn't build my business by spreading FUD about data transfer pricing. I discovered the horrors of data transfer pricing by looking at what was going on in my customers' accounts, and diving deeper.