[HN Gopher] Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS
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Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS
Author : QuinnyPig
Score : 91 points
Date : 2020-04-24 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.duckbillgroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.duckbillgroup.com)
| pavelevst wrote:
| Would be nice to see other cloud providers for comparison
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Generally I find that whenever I'm doing storage calculations
| it's for existing workloads inside of a given cloud provider.
| "We're moving the whole thing to GCP because it's going to be
| X% cheaper" sounds compelling, but... I just don't see it
| happening at anything other than small scale.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| This doesn't seem quite right at least for Glacier Deep Archive.
| I put 12TB in Ohio in Deep Archive and it is saying it should
| cost $250. It should cost ~$12. Maybe just some math typos in the
| calculator?
| EnigmaticProg wrote:
| This list doesn't showcase FSx[0] as an option.
|
| ---
|
| [0] https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator in favor of
| one that makes you describe what you're building first, and this
| makes me sad.
|
| This one only works internally to one region at a time, but it
| compares various costs in different storage mechanisms on an
| apples-to-apples basis as best I can.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator..._
|
| Is AWS deprecating the simple-calculator [0]? Frustratingly, it
| has been neglected and has never supported many aws services.
|
| > _...in favor of one that makes you describe what you 're
| building first, and this makes me sad._
|
| https://calculator.aws is pretty good, to be honest.
|
| Or, are you referring to the TCO calculator [1]?
|
| ---
|
| [0] https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
|
| [1] https://awstcocalculator.com/
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Newbie question: which Amazon storage services can be used to add
| storage to a VPS ? Storage that would be used like a secondary
| disk. My VPS provider is asking way too much to my taste ($50 a
| year for 40Gb disk I think) when comparing with Amazon.
|
| Is it possible at all to mount some amazon storage like I would
| for a block device ?
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| If you can move your VPS over to Amazon, EBS (Elastic Block
| Store) is what you are looking for, but it's likely not much
| cheaper than you're currently paying (EBS is priced at
| $0.10/month per gb, so $40/mo for 40gb of general purpose).
|
| You _can_ mount S3 buckets as a hard disk on a VPS, but that
| isn 't the main use case for S3.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| You'd have to use EC2 or Storage Gateway (to expose S3 as a
| pseudo-block device)
| tracker1 wrote:
| There are FUSE adapters to mount S3 and similar services...
| some have various caching options, and ymmv a lot.
|
| I would test your latency from your VPS to the various S3,
| Azure etc locations... May also want to consider Digital
| Ocean's storage which is API compatible to S3.
| DelightOne wrote:
| > May also want to consider Digital Ocean's storage which is
| API compatible to S3.
|
| Don't forget to rclone to second provider though.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So my cost is $69. But it doesn't say per what!
|
| I assume it's per month, but it really should say.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Not being in a position where I'm billed for storage (work does
| that), I didn't really know either. Guessing per month as well.
| myroon5 wrote:
| It's back up in the top right:
|
| "Your monthly payment will be:"
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Not on the page I get: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-
| super-simple-storage-calcu...
| zceee12 wrote:
| S3 transition costs rely on knowing the number of objects being
| stored and are independent of storage size. If you're moving
| between S3 tiers, this tool provides no input for the number of
| objects being transitioned. These costs can be non-trivial.
| Predicted savings involving S3 transitions also need to consider
| minimum storage duration. Consequently, this feels like a
| misleading tool. It would probably benefit from showing proof of
| working.
| cvaidya1986 wrote:
| Excellent design :)
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Thanks! It didn't fall flatypus.
| bscanlan wrote:
| It's clearly missing storing data uuencoded in Route53 TXT
| records.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Or you can get 75GB free by using Lambda....
|
| https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud...
|
| (Yes this is a joke)
| jedberg wrote:
| It's because of thoughts like this that the number of tags
| per item is limited.
|
| Initially they were going to allow unlimited tags until
| someone pointed out that you could use tags on your items as
| a poor mans key/value store for free.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The price for Glacier Deep Archive is wrong.
|
| I entered {50GB, US-East-<either>} and got a price of $1.05/mo. I
| think the actual price is $0.0495/mo (just under a nickel).
|
| (Less worrying, I don't see Glacier [normal] at all.)
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| You found two bugs. Awesome! Fixing.
|
| I also never use normal Glacier at all (which is how this got
| missed in testing), but the pricing's all there on the backend.
| It's a frontend thing...
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| ...aaaand it's an AWS renaming thing in their pricing API.
| Lovely!
|
| AWS is so bad at naming things that it apparently now breaks
| other things too.
| cure wrote:
| Everything is relative: compared to Azure virtual machine
| family naming, AWS is not so bad!
| sokoloff wrote:
| Maybe related: Reduced Redundancy is showing as more
| expensive than Standard (for same 50G/US-East sample data)
| speedgoose wrote:
| Did you consider to replace the AWS' names and technical terms by
| generic terms and their explanations, so it's easier to
| understand for people not familiar with AWS' storage offers?
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Yes, but that feels a bit out of scope for this calculator.
| Including all of the trade-offs between different storage
| services and when to use each results in basically rewriting
| the AWS marketing pages.
|
| That's a different project of mine. :-)
| ignoramous wrote:
| Related: _AWS in plain english_ (re-write of just the product
| names), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
| _air wrote:
| The mindblown graphic that comes up when you enter a rather large
| data size is delightful :)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Glacier hasn't really seemed like it's worth it for me and
| looking over this calculator it's almost as expensive as Standard
| mode? Why would I use it over Standard, let alone Intelligent
| Tiering - Infrequent Access.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| This calculator is either giving completely wrong outputs for
| the Glacier pricing, or it's secretly throwing in some of the
| other costs like data transfer/API request costs.
|
| For example, for 50 GB it's showing a cost per month of $1.15
| for Standard, which is correct (Standard is priced at
| ~$0.023/GB). For Deep Glacier, it's giving pricing of $1.05
| (which is wildly incorrect, as the price for Deep Glacier is
| ~$0.00099/GB, meaning the monthly cost _should_ say $0.05, or
| less than 5% of the Standard cost).
| mjulian wrote:
| Yeah, we're investigating what's going on with this. Seems
| there's a bug in the public price list we're trying to work
| out.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| I have no earthly idea, personally.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| This is nice, but is it the price per month? Per year?
| gramakri wrote:
| It does say "Your monthly payment will be"
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Oof. Fixing. Good catch!
| dangwu wrote:
| It's monthly, but yes they should add this information.
| sciurus wrote:
| This is neat.
|
| https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calcu...
| is a way to show "how much more expensive is X than S3"?
| bluntfang wrote:
| is this just an ad?
| sl1ck731 wrote:
| I like the design, but is anyone choosing storage based on price?
| I can see comparing cloud-to-cloud, but within a single cloud the
| type of data (blob, block, database, etc...) and the frequency of
| r/w prescribe the storage you should be using regardless of
| price.
|
| I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move
| from EFS to EBS or such because its 8% of the price. I chose EFS
| for a reason in the first place.
|
| Not meaning offense, I'm just unsure of usefulness. Appreciate
| all the content you provide though! Didn't realize who you were
| :)
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| >I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move
| from EFS to EBS or such. I chose EFS for a reason in the first
| place.
|
| How about when your team has terabytes of data stored in EFS
| that is only used sporadically and now you want to move it off?
| (maybe you started with EFS because it makes the most sense for
| your application but now you have a lot of older data that you
| still want to keep but don't necessarily need it to be accessed
| by the application anymore). Something like this helps justify
| how much you could save by starting that migration project.
|
| I do see your point though. IME, calculators like this are used
| more for management who are trying to estimate their budget for
| planning purposes (as in, I have a team that tells me they will
| need 5 TB of S3 storage, how much is that going to cost me?),
| not necessarily by devs making architecture decisions.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Price can affect design decisions - i.e. the number of times
| you access backups for analysis can depend on takeout cost.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Would anyone choose glacier over normal S3 if they were both
| priced the same? I think it's literally the price difference
| that drives you to choose Glacier for archival data, no?
| ceocoder wrote:
| `QuinnyPig - I love the extra mind blown platypus touch when you
| enter 40000 PB
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqdpkiv0ikevsm4/IMG_1937.jpg?dl=0
| axegon_ wrote:
| Given my experience with AWS, I doubt this is reliable in any
| way... Every bill I've ever seen(and paid personally for that
| matter) felt a bit like someone played darts blindfolded. One
| that really struck me (around 3 years ago when I decided to move
| over to gcp) was two consecutive months: my usage was 99.2%
| identical. First month my bill was around 151.01 euros. Second
| month it was 235.32. Everything was absolutely identical, API's
| usage, storage, traffic, everything. I compiled a report sent it
| over to their support and I got a convoluted response which could
| roughly be summarized with -\\_(tsu)_/-
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _my usage was 99.2% identical_
|
| What does that mean? If you're talking about S3, things like
| PUTs are way more expensive than GETs for example (by two
| magnitudes). So your usage can be "nearly identical", you can
| still spend money on precious GETs.
|
| Example: Last month I spent around 300 EUR on food. The month
| before, I spent 150 EUR, yet my food was "97% identical", the
| 3% being those two times I ordered 75 EUR of sushi takeout.
|
| PS: A lot of people get frustrated/confused by AWS pricing and,
| fair enough, but for a lot of businesses it's often a feature
| that they allow developers to architect their applications with
| costs in mind. It's a knife that cuts three different ways.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Yeah, I know how that works. And no, none of that. In my case
| it was renting a GPU for training a model. No put traffic
| involved in either of the cases, the data was in a s3 prior
| to that. It was simply tweaking hyperparameters in the code,
| nothing more. On both occasions it took the exact same time,
| exact same to train, exact same resources. There were
| apparently no changes to the pricing but still. I'm referring
| to aws's quantum bills as a whole. Never had such issues with
| gcp... Yet...
| scrollaway wrote:
| If you're willing to share the reports you wrote up, I'd be
| curious to take a look at them.
| enitihas wrote:
| Does cost explorer show no difference in your top costs?
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(page generated 2020-04-24 23:00 UTC)