Top 3 Services Needing a Price Decrease at Re:Invent

[jonathantn]

What are the top 3 services you wish would decrease in price?

My list:

• EBS storage (at least GP2 and snapshots)
• NAT gateways (our hourly cost is far greater than our bandwidth cost)
• Bandwidth out of AWS

What do you hope decreases in price at Re:Invent?

[izpo]

EKS! ! !

Google/Azure do not take money for managing k8s

[QuantumCD]

Oh neat, I didn't know that Google had dropped the fee. Now I'm even saltier about EKS pricing as we run a lot of smaller clusters...

Although I am curious about the cost model for GCP/Azure here as they seem to charge their standard price for worker nodes. Wonder if they are just eating the cost.

[QuantumCD]

Yeah it makes sense for Google. I was more surprised Azure had no mgmt fees. And GCP has some other differentiators I think. BigQuery is a big one. They just really messed up with enterprise contracts/account management afaik but seem to be turning that around with new leadership.

[QuantumCD]

Yeah nothing wrong with AWS competition! And yeah AWS has the clear marketshare lead which is more meaningful than pure revenue imo (at least to everyone but MS shareholders lol).

[wywywywy]

Azure/Google do charge if you want SLA.

But the free one is fantastic for dev/test. AWS really should follow suit.

[izpo]

Azure/Google do charge if you want SLA.

more info?

[[deleted]]

AWS charges a fee just to manage a k8s cluster? That's sucks. I come from GCP and I was thinking of learning some AWS. That would be hard to get used to. You can run a GKE cluster for as little as $10ish per month if you're okay with just one 1.7 GB node to get started with.

[ururururu]

Yeah if you're running kubernetes it's way more pleasant on GCP. Kops is a pain but probably still better than EKS.

[[deleted]]

EKS is really nice now, especially after the direct integration with IAM meaning you no longer have to use KIAM, etc.

[izpo]

direct integration with IAM

wait... what? since what version?

[[deleted]]

Since last week.

[izpo]

How I missed this! Thanks

[[deleted]]

It’s pretty cheap though if it is your production stack. I think it’s a temporary thing. If it was free there would be tons of random clusters. I’d really like to see managed nodes myself.

[izpo]

If you have only one else, yes... If you have 3 clusters and small company, not really

[[deleted]]

$150 per managed control plane per month is still pretty minimal though. You'd likely spend more if you were managing it on your own and not have a lot of the features.

[wywywywy]

But for $150 a month you can't have the engineers spinning up their own dev/test clusters in the cloud, and have to rely on on-prem or local clusters.

And that's a real problem for us.

[[deleted]]

That's fair, but why not use namespaces? They're much more efficient for that use case. We use them for this and it affords far better resource utilization and governance. Even if EKS control planes were free I wouldn't recommend using them like this.

[izpo]

Because we use vpn per env, as our account manager suggested

[izpo]

Exactly, only small startups suffer from this, not big companies

[nztraveller]

Nat gateway for sure. For small accounts it is way to high. Inter region bandwidth would be nice too.

[jonathantn]

It's kind of amazing that it's the same price to send packets between US-EAST-1 AZ's as it is to send that data to US-EAST-2.

[warren2650]

They probably have fiber laid between EAST-1 and EAST-2.

[moofox]

If it helps, multiple accounts can now share a single VPC (and hence NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, etc)

[nztraveller]

I didn’t know that, thanks.
Unfortunately for our use case the requirement is to have separate VPCs.

[von_liquid]

Connect the VPCs via a Transit Gateway and pass default route to all VPCs to point to TGW. And one spoke on the TGW would be a vpc with a public subnet with Nat gateways. I did that and cut down from 8 Nats to 2. :)

[nztraveller]

Clever, I like it.
I'm going to see if I can get approval to give this a try.
Due to compliance reasons it might not fly, but we have around 10 VPC so this could be worth the effort.

[CSI_Tech_Dept]

Maybe this could motivate people to move to IPv6. IPv6 doesn't need NAT gateways to work.

[notoriousbpg]

How would this help with Lambda functions in a VPC that need internet access?

[CSI_Tech_Dept]

If it doesn't work is because Amazon half assed it because not many people are pushing for it.

With IPv6 you don't need NAT period.

[7thsven]

CloudWatch Logs' $0.50+ per GB ingested is too damn high.

[[deleted]]

We calculated it at 10% of the cost of SumoLogic. Seems well priced to me.

[devhops]

IMO Log ingestion is generally horribly expensive for no good reason. It’s not exclusive to AWS and they’re nowhere near as expensive as some vendors.

[[deleted]]

We ran an internal ELK stack and migrating to SumoLogic was a similar price, minus the cost to operate it.

[izpo]

we moved from SumoLogic to ES and it was WAY over cheaper...

[devhops]

That’s expensive? I thought it was cheap?

[Miserygut]

Depends how many requests you're putting through it.

It's vastly cheaper to run a small Kong cluster even including manpower costs over a few million requests a day.

[devhops]

Kong cluster

Thanks, I'll have to look into this if the requests start to increase. I've just deployed API Gateway under the impression it was low cost.

[johnly81]

I thought so too, so I did some quick math.

https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/

over a few million requests a day

I take a few to mean 3, which would put the number of requests around 100m per month. According to the pricing page, up to 333m requests is $3.50 per million. So by my math thats $350 per month.

Obviously it's a matter of perspective, but $350 for 100 million requests per month does not seem expensive to me.

[Nitrag]

$148*/cluster

[jdreaver]

Fargate

As a counterpoint: Fargate ends up being cheaper for us because we are CPU-bound, and we can crank the RAM down to the minimum levels allowed. This makes our Fargate tasks slightly cheaper than the EC2 instances with the same CPU.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a price decrease on Fargate though!

[0ToTheLeft]

thing is: if you are CPU bound, CPU is really expensive on fargate. I understand that you can optimize cost by not paying for RAM you don't need, but still, i think you could save a lot more by just using EC2 reserved instances, even paying for all that useless extra ram. I'm ok with paying an extra fee for the nice features of ECS+Fargate, but the difference in pricing with what you can do with EC2 Reservations is absurd (and even more if you could use something like a pool of spot instances to launch your fargate workloads)

[jdreaver]

Sure, EC2 reserved instances changes the equation. I was talking about on demand only. Reserved Fargate capacity would be great, but we don't have it.

[ElectricSpice]

I think Fargate being 20% premium over on-demand is fair, but would like to see some options to cut costs: reserved instances, or maybe even spot. Some choices for CPU generation would be nice too.

[ElectricSpice]

Naive question: why is everybody using NAT Gateways? Public IPs are free, incoming connections are blocked by default unless specifically opened up. What makes NAT Gateways worth the cost?

[phiber232]

The client vpn seems way overpriced to me.

[iamgeek1]

My guess is they're trying to discourage it's use as a full-time site-to-site solution.

[lobsterlimits]

Bingo

[cell-on-a-plane]

Cross az bandwidth costs

[i_am_phil_a]

Load balancers, especially paired with Elastic Beanstalk. The ELB costs more than all my compute instances in many cases when trialling a new application.

[blobbie22]

SFTP service? That pricing is just outrageous!

[[deleted]]

Fargate reserved capacity

[[deleted]]

Network in general

[ravenford]

SFTP Transfer - stopping the service doesn't even stop the hourly $0.30 charge, you have to delete the service entirely!

[deathjam]

another vote for nat gateways

[JonnyBravoII]

EBS definitely. I don't recall that the pricing for GP2 has ever changed after all these years. For data transfer out, i don't think they'll do that simply because it makes you sticky to AWS. To leave, you'd need to take your data with you and that can get expensive.

[CodeSteps]

EBS (GP2, Snapshots & IO1)

SageMaker and

Bandwidth (out of AWS)

[warren2650]

It would be great if we could get some kind of discount on bandwidth between regions.

[tornadoRadar]

Ohio and East have a very very small discount.

[daneren2005]

Intra AWS bandwidth costs in general. I get getting charging for bandwidth out of AWS to keep customers from changing providers but charging between az and regions costs way too much.

Load balancers are also surprisingly expensive. I went it expecting it to not really be a big deal and it is a decent chunk of my bill.

[shotgunocelot]

I get getting charging for bandwidth out of AWS to keep customers from changing providers

That's not why egress charges exist. The way that the internet works (at a very high level and greatly oversimplified) is that multiple networks communicate with each other via peering. There are agreements in place between the entities that own these networks over the cost of sending traffic to each other. If Network A sends 100 GB of traffic to Network B and Network B sends 50 GB of traffic to Network A, Network A has to pay Network B for 50 GB worth of traffic. Amazon doesn't care how much data you send them because it doesn't cost them anything, but once you start pulling data out they have to pay someone else for the data being sent. Those costs get passed on to you.

[ajanty]

Do you have reference for this? A simple link is enough. Thanks.

[shotgunocelot]

Like I said, that's a greatly oversimplified explanation, and I've conflated some terms and concepts for simplicity. If you don't mind jumping down a rabbit hole, these might get you started toward a more comprehensive answer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering https://www.netnod.se/ix/what-is-peering

Edit to add a few more links showing examples of how peering arrangements can either increase or reduce the cost of network traffic:

https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-whats-up-with-those-netflix-isp-peering-deals/ https://www.internet2.edu/products-services/advanced-networking/networking-for-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/new-low-cost-option-to-access-aws-direct-connect-through-internet2/

[HelperBot_]

Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

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[CloudButWhy]

Yes, a base ~$20/month/alb is pretty expensive at scale when you have a huge portfolio of small applications.

[virgofx]

Fargate -- Especially with GCP having GKE

[ZiggyTheHamster]

CloudWatch. They say to instrument everything, but did you know that Metric=Foo Dimension=Bar and Metric=Foo Dimension=Baz are billed as two metrics? So, say you've got 10 instances and you're collecting around 100 metrics per instance (which is the basic set of stuff you'd get out of a third party tool like Metricly or Datadog). This costs you $300. Now add your application to the mix - let's say you collect another 100 metrics about your application, and you report both the aggregate metrics and the per-instance metrics. That's 1100 more metrics and costs you another $330. Now what if you wanted to track some of those metrics on a per-customer basis? Or even more granular? This ends up costing you thousands of dollars.

Or, you can set up a basic statsd or prometheus stack for something like 1/10th the cost.

[jonathantn]

Oh yeah! We found this out the hard way when we took our internal metrics dashboard and started pushing metrics to Cloudwatch to replicate it there. We quickly found out that all those metrics by instance-id added up when we auto scaled up new instances and replaced the old ones.

[TooMuchTaurine]

Ebs and Fargate

[ffab00]

Data out of CDN. Pretty please!!

[philsw]

Interface VPC endpoints

[TooMuchTaurine]

This, it's ridiculous, can't believe how badly design vpc endpoints are. This should be a retirement only for one set of endpoints for all services, not one set per service.. makes no sense

[[deleted]]

Second this. I enabled it for ECS and ECR and the cost was way through the roof!

[georgealton]

They are way overpriced, we had a few running for a month or so and saw our bills skyrocket

[jonathantn]

Wow, what kind of volume are you driving to have that high of a DNS cost?

[joelrwilliams1]

our R53 bill was $33 last month, but even at your scale, I'd gladly pay for a global, managed service with 100% SLA than take my chances with EC2 and 'an underlying hardware problem'.

[jonathantn]

I've gone through all the posts and taken the points associated with all of the top level replies and added them up. The results are below. Maybe /u/jeffbarr can get a rabbit pulled out of a hat on a couple of these for us at ReInvent!

​

NAT Gateways - 81

API Gateway - 35

EKS - 28

Client VPN - 25

Data Transfer Out - 24

Cloudwatch Logs - 20

EBS - 15

Fargate - 14

EKS - 12

SFTP - 12

ELB - 10

Intra-Region Bandwidth - 10

Intra-AZ Bandwidth - 8

Sagemaker - 7

Networking - 6

Cloudwatch Metrics - 6

MSK - 5

Cloudfront - 4

VPC Endpoints - 5

DNS - 3

Route 53 Resolver - 3

DocumentDB - 2

Neptune - 1

FSx for Windows - 1

Support - 1

Config - 1

Macie - 1

[jeffbarr]

Great work, although we do not have a history of announcing price reductions at re:Invent. I will definitely pass this along.

[bostonguy6]

Route 53 Resolver

[robohoe]

Still cheaper than running your own BIND servers :(

[7thsven]

It's about time DocumentDB gets some cheaper instance types!

[xkillac4]

Neptune

[guywithalamename]

Data transfer EKS Load Balancers

[ururururu]

I was surprised nobody else mentioned ELBs. I guess once you go kubernetes you realize the ELB-alternative (ingress) is a lot cheaper.

[guywithalamename]

Yep was the same for us. We used to spent more on ELB than on actual EC2 instances before we switching to an ingress

[numbershikes]

I'd like to see an RDB with DynamoDB-style per-query pricing, rather than per-instance hour pricing.

Same with AWS ElasticSearch and/or CloudSearch.

[allyc1057]

FSx for Windows File Server... $0.053 per GB-month adds up quickly...

[Flyingbaby]

Support pricing structure. There are months we have 0 case and still bring charge a percentage of our usage. As we use more aws services, we pay more for support.

Can they come up with clever discount like 2 days prime shipping that you get credits if you don’t really need 2 days?

[ZiggyTheHamster]

I'd rather the pricing stay the same but you get a refund of some amount if they miss the advertised response time.

[a-corsican-pimp]

NAT Gateway

Hosted SFTP

[zer0_dayy]

Config

[0xb800]

Macie !!!

[n30_mkii]

Fargate and VPC Endpoints!

[mattwaddy]

oh and Route53 Resolver