Yup. It is like a gravity well. Escape velocity is your egress data charges ;)

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time

Someone should set up a big fat pipe right outside of Amazon data centers with free unlimited transfers, get data on behalf of customers copied to hard drives from AWS, and then attach those hard drives to the Uber pipe. I bet that service could work for a short & glorious moment in time.

Amazon beat you to it: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Snowball still charges ~3 cents/GB to get it out of S3 and into Snowball.

Well, there is always https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Keeping track of all the different offerings AWS has is a full time job.

Someone does it for you https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

I am completely unaffiliated with this site, I just enjoy it

Cloud architect is a title as a result.

It literally is.

I've been a developer for 10 years and AWS seems to me like its intentionally designed to be as messy as possible.

Totally agree. AWS should learn something from DO, instead of racking up services. Inconsistent UI completely sucks. It makes very difficult to track resources and billing. Resources from different regions need to be managed separately. Billing is too much complicated. I always feel AWS is hype. Very few applications need scaling like Netflix. But as it is now industry standard, people are adopting it blindly without considering usecases.

Fun fact is, that Netflix only hosts their website on AWS, the video stream is delivered from their very own CDN which is completely self-engineered by them and multiple magnitudes cheaper than AWS: https://openconnect.netflix.com/

no prices. don't underestimate the bandwidth of a fully loaded tractor trailer, 21st century style

I'm disappointed that one doesn't appear to be available via API.

That would still require egress.

How about just sending Freedom Of Information Act request to the NSA asking them for a copy of your data. I think this is a joke...

Government agencies can (and often do) charge FOIA processing fees. Not that this has anything to do with cloud egress charges though.

I was going to say it’d be an improvement but I can’t actually make sense of the AWS Snowball proving

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

The pricing seems relatively clear:

A flat fee for the act of a human getting the data onto the physical medium ($200) + the cost of shipping (<$100?) + $15 per day you keep the snowball device past the first + price per GB of data you're transferring ($0.03 per/GB).

So if your getting out 30 TB of data that's $200 + ~$100 + ($0.03 * 30000) = ~$1200

I was confused by the “Standard Amazon S3 storage and request pricing applies.” That seems to be a different thing from the extra S3 transfer costs.

Does Amazon want that, though? There are efforts for other providers to avoid bandwidth cost: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ but Amazon isn't in there

Just like a roach motel!

or Hotel California ...