Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by re-thc on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @07:33AM
(#35054598)
It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by amluto on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:50AM
(#35055941)
The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud.
This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on.
(To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by latchkey on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:16PM
(#35058011)
Depending on what I'm building, I tend to cache on the edge with something like CloudFlare in front of GCP. Lowers the egress charges significantly, with the benefit of speeding everything up too.
fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that.
At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo.
For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps cost about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead.
You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.