Amazon S3 Price Reduction

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/amazon-s3-price-reduction.html

by jeffbarr • 14 years ago

146 56 14 years ago

aws.typepad.com

masterleep5• 14 years ago

It's still pretty expensive for archival storage without instant access requirements. Can somebody please do a tape based cloud storage service with slow file access but much cheaper per TB storage costs?

Tossrock• 14 years ago

Do tape drives really still offer better bytes/dollar than HDDs? I'll admit to being unfamiliar with them.

whatusername• 14 years ago

For certain scales and usage patterns. a 1.5TB* Tape is about $50. However it: (1) should last longer than a HDD and (2) Uses much less power, cooling, floor space, etc.

* Tape also has really nice compression (essentially you would be using the on-tape compression at least 95% of the time) with an average of about 2:1 (and often much higher). But you can also compress files on disk -- so it's just native storage.

Also -- Things like the SL8500 are such beautiful pieces of machinery. Computers + Robots = Awesome!

Editing to Add: LTO5 was released in 2010. LTO6 is likely to arrive this year with 3.2TB Native Capacity. (And the usual speed bumps of 50% Write // 100% Read speed). The roadmap for the tech is here: http://www.spectralogic.com/common/images/products/lto/lto5/...

acdha• 14 years ago

The big question is scale: tape robot systems are expensive to purchase and somewhat less reliable compared to an HDD so you have significant infrastructure costs bringing up the storage system, establishing a system of off-site rotation and redundancy, testing restores on separate drives (one common failure mode is that a tape drive slowly goes out of alignment, writing data which cannot be read by a calibrated drive), etc.

These are great examples of something which could be commodified so a provider could amortize them across many customers but the margins are continually tightening.

toomuchtodo4• 14 years ago

http://nimbus.io (yeah, not live yet, but at only 6 cents/GB, its worth keeping an eye on)

masterleep5• 14 years ago

Half price is of course better, but for my use case, I want something ten times cheaper. I'm willing to trade convenience and latency for that cost saving.

Use case: I want to be able to shoot several minutes of video on my cell phone and keep it backed up in the cloud without feeling like I've incurred a $1/year charge for the rest of my life.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

Usenet Binaries ಠ_ಠ

jtchang• 14 years ago

I wonder how slow you'd be willing to go.

Would you be willing to pay $1 for 100GB if it meant waiting 15 minutes to load your tape? How about 30 minutes?

ars2• 14 years ago

$1 per 100GB per what? If it was per year I might do it, certainly not per month.

toomuchtodo4• 14 years ago

Yes. If I could pay $10/TB/month, request a list of files via API, and be notified via webhook when I could retrieve them (and therefore, retrieve them while they're cached on spinning media for 24 hours), I'd definitely do it. I've got tons of video, pictures, and music to back up, and I don't need immediate access to backups.

bambax• 14 years ago

For some data, I could wait a week. I take pictures and movies that take up a lot of space; I don't want to ever lose them but they are not mission critical in any way, shape or form.

I store everything on a NAS + another NAS as backup; it's a fairly safe setup as long as my house doesn't burn down, isn't flooded or burglarized.

I would love an offsite backup solution that would be cheap because of very slow reads: if my house burns down it'll be some time before I can access those backups anyway.

Yrlec2• 14 years ago

My start-up (http://degoo.com) is working on a P2P backup system that I think will match your requirements quite well. We are launching our beta tests within next couple of months. </shamelessplug>

smokinn• 14 years ago

You don't really need the plug tags. HN is generally quite receptive to self-advertising of on-topic personal startups.

reidrac• 14 years ago

There are other providers that are definitely cheaper. Specially thanks to OpenStack Object Storage you can find different services with the same API, so you have an open door to leave any time.

ie. my employer offers a OS based service (slightly lower rates, upload is free, based in UK): http://www.memset.com/cloud/storage/

Terretta2• 14 years ago

How much content and how much cheaper? And what about access via rsync instead of "tape based"?

afhof• 14 years ago

I've never understood why they use a stair step function for pricing. Why not just name a continuous function for pricing and simplify the scheme?

shingen• 14 years ago

They specifically want to economically encourage bringing the house with you to get the cheapest rate (total commitment); or encourage building a larger house than you might otherwise have. A continuous function of price reduction per unit, rewards everyone as they go; Amazon very specifically doesn't want to do that (users gain benefit at every step, and are rewarded just for being at any given metric, encouraging no particular scale or usage).

The price points are supposed to be mental carrots, in other words. It can of course be debated which approach is better, but I have to suspect Amazon has a lot of data on scaling and pricing from retail behavior.

match2• 14 years ago

Yes and no. Correct me if I'm wrong but tipping over into the text tier doesn't change the price of the previous data, only the data that's in the next tier.

notaddicted• 14 years ago

The pricing function is "continuous", it isn't differentiable.

mshang• 14 years ago

I think it was meant that the marginal cost function isn't continuous.

mthreat• 14 years ago

This is good news. Now if they would lower their EC2 instance pricing, especially large RAM instances!

libria• 14 years ago

Interesting. That puts them from just above below Google's Cloud Storage to just below, https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms#p.... I didn't even think GCS was on their radar.

justincormack4• 14 years ago

Amazon started cutting prices long before there was any competition. I dont think this is due to Google, as for most people the difference in network costs depending if you use EC2 matters more. It is probably more to do with hard drive prices renormalizing after the flooding...

ellie42• 14 years ago

What about Rackspace Cloud Files? http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/...

justincormack4• 14 years ago

What about it? It was more expensive, and now looks worse. If you host at rackspace though the network costs will make it cheaper.

NARKOZ• 14 years ago

See comparison[1]. It's still cheaper than Amazon. They don't charge for requests and incoming bandwidth.

1: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/...

RKearney• 14 years ago

Amazon also does not charge for inbound bandwidth. I'm not sure what you're getting at. They also had to do the comparison with the additional support package from Amazon to inflate the price to make their pricing model look more appealing.

wlll• 14 years ago

I graphed the old and new prices so you can see how they compare:

http://willj.net/static/amazon_s3_old_and_new_price_comparis...

jwr2• 14 years ago

What I find slightly worrying is that the cost of EC2 instances does not decrease more with time. DRAM prices have fallen quite a bit since EC2 started, and yet the cost of EC2 remains relatively stable.

Poiesis• 14 years ago

I would imagine that their power costs have not fallen quite as quickly.

jwr2• 14 years ago

Look at EC2 pricing — instance pricing is pretty much a function of RAM size. I realize RAM isn't everything, but it is a large variable factor, with other cost factors either being constant or not growing proportionally fast.

I'd still argue that we should see bigger drops in pricing, especially for the large-memory instances.

saurik• 14 years ago

While Amazon keeps reducing the price of storage, I don't think they have ever reduced the price of requests. :( I would have expected the cost of every component of a request (CPU, bandwidth, etc.) would have gone down over time, but it is still 1000 PUT/LISTs per $0.01 (or 10k GETs, also per $0.01). :(

(These request costs actually add up quite quickly: I spent something like $8k on PUT/LIST last month. At one point I found out a client library I was using made the horrible decision to verify the bucket existed with a LIST request each time you made a connection; I tracked that down to $70/day I was losing.)

Amazon S3 Price Reduction

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