How was it ever possible for S3 to take such a market share. Or is this market share not existing? Coming from the 90ies I could never imagine paying for outgoing traffic when already paying for a server with internet connection. There was a.early time where you would get throttled to 100MBit (and much earlier in time to 10MBit/s) but this is long gone. What do you do with S3 that such prices seem fair for anything other than rarely accessed files?
I know why; I was there! (first AWS employee in EU, 2008, stayed there until 2014).
Back then, using traditional IT providers or internal IT services, you needed weeks, paperwork, etc, to get any storage or compute.
Then AWS arrives, and you could have infinite storage, or tens of EC2 instances, within a few minutes. And pay with a freaking credit card!
It didn't matter that AWS' performance was abysmal at the time. Or that AWS was expensive. AWS solved a huge pain point for millions of people, and that's why it became a market leader.
For one, you only get billed for outgoing traffic from AWS. So if all your infra is on AWS, you're not paying for that. Secondly the ease of use is a lot compared to back when you had to buy a bunch of servers to put hard drives in - remember s3 was one of the first aws services, alongside ec2.
If your load wasn't high, cause you're a startup or whatever, then paying the extra premium on the storage to save the engineering effort of building your own storage cluster worked out. Then when you were big, those egress costs had you locked out.
Plus add in thoughts about having to maintain infra vs aws do it for you and you had a lot of developer blogs/marketing sites of tech companies/whatever just serve on s3 since it was easy to use and the absolute cost for such a product is low enough that they didn't care about the relative cost of s3 vs other services.
Unless things have changed I'm not sure it's accurate that you only get charged for external traffic on AWS: I recall having pretty substantial charges internal to AWS just for traffic between different AZs in the same region, for example.
I think the parent is talking specifically about S3 rather than all of AWS -- S3 is a regional service and you can access it from any AZ within that region without additional fees. Cross-AZ charges are more commonly an issue with things like load balancers and EC2 instances.
Cross Region is common use case which makes S3 access from another region or if you are migrating painfully expensive when Compute is in multiple regions .
Cross Region replication is typical setup for many DR use cases and S3 will charge you Inter-region transfer cost for replication as well.
I suspect Cloudflare and any clones could set up their peering agreements with Cloud providers in such a way that they're exposed as a feature. First tier Cloud providers probably won't bite because it would open the door to people migrating out of their data centers.
Second tier Cloud providers would eat that up, since it would democratize things more. Even if a competitor gets the customer, at least it's not the guy who is waging a war of attrition against you.
You are only not charged if all your infra is the same location and same availability zone and same VPC .[1]
The egress cost between anything beyond will cost you a ton of money
Virtual servers are a thing since ... forever on the Internet. At least since mid-nineties you had not to think about getting hard drives into servers, if you would not wanted to.
Yes, and that's like saying that you don't understand why people eat at restaurants when there's field full of cauliflower. If you're comparing it to S3, using virtual servers means you're now taking on responsibility for configuring, operating, and securing replicated file storage in at least 3 geographically separated regions, scaling it when you start to fill up those local disks, building an API on top of that, and providing web-based access. Don't forget things like bitrot detection and prevention, storage encryption, centralized logging, event-based triggers, lifecycle management policies, tiering onto cheaper storage either by policy or automatically.
For many organizations, the 24x7 staffing needed to provide an equivalent service alone would pay for their entire storage cost multiple times over. Even if your scale is sufficient to allow beating that, you are likely to have more compelling problems for that time to be spent on.
(This is not saying that the egress charges are great, only that I completely understand why many, many people decided it was an acceptable tradeoff)
VPSes were usually not cost effective either if what you wanted was a big pool of storage space. The big growth opportunity for S3 was the companies that would otherwise run their own SANs, not the startup that was going to run on a couple of VPSes or shared hosting otherwise.
Even the startups that grew, they might start on a VPS provider, but outgrow them. S3 managed to scale with them and retain them as customers.
They were first and from a featureset and reliability perspective, S3 is still unparalleled.
That coupled with storage costs that were always very competitive and the fact you had unlimited scale and PAYG pricing got a lot of people hooked.
It’s going to take a long time for S3 customers who have experienced pretty amazing uptime and reliability for the entire life of the service to put the same level of trust in something else.
CF did a really smart thing by making R2 be able to operate as a transparent caching-replica of S3.
Consolidated billing. AWS could in fact raise prices across the board and all my previous companies would continue to pay them and not care one bit. Finance departments love AWS bills and the simple annual negotiations that come with them.
I'm a big fan of just renting real hardware and running stuff there for a fraction of the price of the Cloud, if it fits your use case.
But doing durable storage yourself, especially once the amounts get a bit unwieldy is scary. For low amounts of data you can get away with just making plenty of copies in different places, but that gets much more difficult once it's a serious amount of data. Object storage is the most appealing service even if you want to do most of the stuff yourself. And this is an area where an established track record is important, you don't want to store your data if you're not sure the service is reliable.
