Comment by re-thc
1 month ago
> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT
How is the cost of NAT free?
> Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.
I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.
Presumably they're talking about the egregious price of NAT on AWS.
It's next to free self hosting considering even the crappiest consumer router has hardware accelerated NAT and takes a tiny amount of power. You likely already have the hardware and power since you need routing and potentially other network services
> Presumably they're talking about the egregious price of NAT on AWS.
Maybe. I agree AWS is over-priced. However it shouldn't be "free".
> It's next to free self hosting considering even the crappiest consumer router
That's not the same product / service is it? We're discussing networking products and this "crappiest" consumer router wouldn't even push real world 100m of packets.
salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers
nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this).
sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.
NAT is a stateful network function and incredibly complex to implement efficiently. NAT is never free.
it's already there and fully supported and accelerated by switches and connected hardware, switches like juniper do have licensing fees to use such features, but a company like AWS can surely work around these licensing costs and build an in-house solution.
2 replies →
They said “charging more than free” - i.e., more than $0, i.e., they’re not free. It was awkwardly worded.
They said "instead of charging more than free", which means should be free.
Please read it again.
I think we’re in violent agreement, but you were ambiguous about what “cost” meant. It seems you meant “cost of providing NAT” but I interpreted it as “cost to the customer.”
> Please read it again.
There’s no need to be rude.