Vendor lock-in. It prevents people from otherwise picking the best provider for the task at hand - for example using some managed AWS services, but keeping the bulk of your compute on-prem or at a (much cheaper) bare-metal host.
It makes sense, but I wish there was an option to opt-out, as to allow high-bandwidth applications that are fully on AWS (at the moment AWS is a non-starter for many of those even if you have no intention of using AWS competitors like in the scenario above).
Maybe they should just price end-user egress vs competitor egress differently (datacenter and business provider IPs are priced like now, but consumer-grade provider IPs are much cheaper/free)? That would discourage provider-hopping, while making AWS a viable provider even for high-bandwidth applications such as serving or proxying media.
If subsidizing the networking products would require a 10x or higher markup on egress, then that is not the correct way to organize prices.
Egress costs are where AWS makes money. You can get around that by negotiating lower cloudfront costs then basically exfiltrating your data via cloudfront. We were getting < .01/gb pricing (.0071?) for only like a $2k/mo commitment.
Maybe it's just a goal to reduce costs, but it seems likely that this is a response to Google's introduction of AlloyDB, a Postgres-compatible database competing with Aurora that is advertised as having "no...opaque I/O charges". I doubt Amazon was feeling generous.
Agreed.
Azure on the other hand is notoriously expensive and do everything possible to raise prices.
And then tie in how some AWS services only a binary choice between logging ridiculous volumes of data or nothing at all (looking at you, AppSync) to make the log ingestion fees high too.
I have a hard time reading "amazon" and "lower costs" in the same sentence.
The cloud is consistently an order of magnitude more expensive than self hosting, even when including people cost, unless you need every single bit of load balancing/high availability/normalization they provide.
The vast majority of projects don't.
No surprises here. Come what may, Amazon has always strived to lower costs (the low costs, more customers, more volume fly-wheel?). This is but one example.
AWS adopted cost-follow pricing for S3 (very different from value-based pricing) after apparently a lengthy debate: As they get more efficient, they want to pass down those savings to customers (as price reductions):
From: https://archive.is/lT5zTI wonder what explains AWS' high egress costs, though.