All of them (AWS, GCP, Azure) are priced outrageously compared to high quality, well peered, bandwidth.

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

Ok, help me out: "cold-potato"? :D

Vs "hot potato"

Hold onto the packet for as long as you can vs hand it off to your peer as quickly as possible.

Most networks do "hot", Google does "cold" since their network is almost always better than that of the peer.

The origin of which, for those who aren't familiar, is a game called "hot potato" where you try to pass a ball around as quickly as possible as if it was a hot potato

Weird terminology. Thanks for explaining though

It is the inverse of “hot potato” routing where the network tries to get rid of a packet as soon as possible (that is, drop a hot potato). Cold potato means the network keeps the packet on-network as long as it can.

Cold potato is not necessarily better, actually its often times worse than hot potato and usually used to lower costs so you don't have to pay other people for transit.

For example, a cold potato network may have a link from Dallas to Chicago to New York, while a hot potato network could have a direct link from Dallas to New York.

Cogent uses cold potato and is frequently worse than other transit providers.

Google's cold potato is very good though.

(Also, they offer the option to use hot potato and pay them less: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/docs/overview )

Thanks, you made my day.

I'm a Google network SRE, but perhaps I'll get new business cards saying "cold potato engineer".

So it's hard to value the premium for google cold potato specifically, if it outclasses everything else.

But their hot potato still costs $65+ per TB at medium volumes and $45+ per TB at high volumes. That is still extremely high compared to normal peering costs.

It does have advantages, but it's not always worth the difference of "several cents per GB" versus "fractions of a cent per GB".

Walmart is generally cheaper than a steak restaurant. YMMV, and they both have their uses. Its worth going to both.

That's a very odd analogy, and overstating the difference.

My company was getting massive bills on AWS S3 egress. It was one of the reasons we moved to Wasabi for bucket storage; we then had to deal with a huge one time hit for egress, but in the long run the short term cost was worth it.

Do you think Wasabi is sustainable? I looked at them but find it hard to believe they can sustain free unlimited egress forever.

I like the Cloudflare/Backblaze duo. Presumably data stays on Cloudflare's network for as long as possible and goes to Backblaze via direct links, so Backblaze can provide free egress to Cloudflare customers (and customers of other serivces like Packet, etc.), while charging others.

This seems more sustainable than Wasabi's model, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

I just put 1 TB in AWS/Azure/GCP's cost calculators.

AWS (US East 1, no free tier) - $92.07

Azure (East US) - $88.65

GCP (Americals) - $122.88

I'm quite surprised by GCP being the highest cost here, and by such a wide margin.

Backblaze has good rates, but it's only really good for storage...which is their main use. I am also surprised GCS (GCP?) is so high. Last a checked AWS was the highest, maybe they cut their rates. I am a pretty happy Azure customer. My only complaint really are their service plans being subpar, but now I've switched over to their IaaS model and it's much better.