The cost of AWS Networking

[AWSdude]

Let me be the first to start this. Why the heck is networking (specifically CDN and egress traffic) so darn expensive on the AWS Cloud platform?

AWS First 10 TB / Month: 9/cents/gig, so if my math is correct, that is approx $90/TB for data transfer. That is coming from an EC2 instance.

If you want to send data out via Cloudfront, the cost is approximately the same. When you run these same numbers through another CDN pricing calculator, it is pennies on the dollar.

So, why is the AWS egress so expensive?

 

[admin]

This is why many people in the prosumer world, who need the reliability of AWS for their services (s3, ec2, etc), try to avoid serving super high bandwidth sites on AWS.

I often wonder, what Netflix used to pay in bandwidth charges when they were on AWS. Now that I think about it, wasn't Dropbox on AWS at one time?

 

[Martha]

AWS pricing for networking, especially CDNs (CloudFront) and egress traffic is shockingly high. I think there are practically convincing reasons behind it. One main reason is the
Infrastructure cost. Delivering data globally requires massive, high-speed networks, edge locations, and redundant systems. That hardware and maintenance cost gets passed into the service fees.

 

[Heatman]

I often wonder, what Netflix used to pay in bandwidth charges when they were on AWS. Now that I think about it, wasn't Dropbox on AWS at one time?

The high cost of that was the part of the main reason why Netflix began migrating its own services off AWS around mid-2010s. The migration was completed around 2016/2017.

Yes, Dropbox was on AWS till around 2016 before it completed a multi-year project called Magic Pocket. They had most customer data migrated off AWS S3.