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Comment by smitty1e

2 years ago

My funny story is built on the idea that AWS is Hotel California for your data.

A customer had an interest in merging the data from an older account into a new one, just to simplify matters. Enterprise data. Going back years. Not even leaving the region.

The AWS rep in the meeting kinda pauses, says: "We'll get back to you on the cost to do that."

The sticker shock was enough that the customer simply inherited the old account, rather than making things tidy.

Is R2 a sensible option for hosting data? I understand egress is chesp.

  • R2 is great. Our GCS bill (almost all egress) jumped from a few hundred dollars a month to a couple thousand dollars a month last year due to a usage spike. We rush-migrated to R2 and now that part of the bill is $0.

    I've heard some people here on HN say that it's slow, but I haven't noticed a difference. We're mainly dealing with multi-megabyte image files, so YMMV if you have a different workload.

    • awesome. I remember reading about this a while ago, but never tried. Since it has the same API i can imagine its not daunting as a multi-cloud infrastructure.

      I guess permissions might be more complex, as in EC2 instance profiles wouldnt grant access, etc.

      1 reply →

Eh? I've never had a problem moving data out of AWS.

Have people lost the ability to write export and backup scripts?

  • My (peripheral) experience is that it is much cheaper to get data in than to get data out. When you have the amount of data being discussed — "Enterprise data. Going back years." — that can get very costly.

    It's the amount of data where it makes more sense to put hard drives on a truck and drive across the country rather than send it over a network, where this becomes an issue (actually, probably a bit before then).

  • Just in network costs, there's a huge asymmetry. Uploading data to AWS is free. Downloading data from them, you have to pay.

    When you have enough data, that cost is quite significant.

  • The ingress/egress cost is ridiculously high. Some companies don't care, but it is there and I've seen it catch people off guard multiple times.

    • Oh come on from the description both accounts could be sitting on the same datacenter LAN.