Amazon's goal is to get people to pay a premium to get access to their entire ecosystem of services. They don't optimize the price of each individual service. There's a lot of take it or leave it for their specific offerings. Look at how they used to have reduced redundancy as a cost saver, but don't anymore. If you want corner-cutting storage from Amazon, you get funneled into Glacier now.
So let's look at how glacier deep archive is $.99 per TB per month, with a waiting time. And Google's weird offering where it costs $1.23 per TB per month, with instant access, but you pay a bunch of money to access. That means they can't store it on tapes, but they expect to profit anyway. And they're probably not running that as a loss leader that depends on the archival data being accessed.
Actually, looking closer, is one-zone even storing fewer copies? It's offering the same durability, except in the case of "availability zone destruction". So if they're selling three copies for $10 a TB, then the equivalent price for 64-of-96 would be $5 a TB. Cutting that down with cheaper worse hardware would go a long way to get you toward the $2 goal.
If instead they decide it's the cash cow, then it wouldn't be a stretch to predict that they price it a bit above the competition. The customer has the impression that they can amortize the cost across the other value-adds in the ecosystem. Whether the customer is right or not barely matters to Amazon from a purely financial aspect. All that matters is that they believe it to be true.
There's also the short-term versus the long term strategy. Short term they could do either and I wouldn't be surprised. Long term, I think I would expect the latter.
Glacier Deep Archive is .99/TB/month in US East and EU Ireland and several others, plus $2.50/TB bulk retrieval.
https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing
Archive Storage is $1.20/TB/month in us-east1 and europe-west1 and several others. But (instant) retrieval is $50/TB, with no options...
A good is example are the Apple iPhone screens. If Apple wants a new competing supplier, they have to invest in new competitors.
This is bad for customers in the long term. Like how Amazon is slowly destroying brick and mortar stores, or having Amazon Basics at the front undercutting other sellers. Monopolies mean you don’t have an open fair market anymore.
so many options
From operational experience reports of S3 I've seen out there and discussions [1], including on HN [2], once you reach a large enough object count, S3 is "sorta-reliable". Objects will disappear. The durability claim is not SLA-enforced [3], which is uptime-oriented. The only remedy is a service credit.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/data_durability_sta...
I didn’t think much about it, but I guess I was really unlucky.
Because of AWS scale it cannot be the cheapest. Amazon cannot use odd lots or small lots, which means that it has very few possible suppliers and those suppliers will never be the cheapest.
Same goes for the network infrastructure. While it is possible buy 100Gbit/sec at a throw away price to because some sales person needs to make his numbers and neither he nor his director of sales thinks Kmod Hosting would be able to fill the pipe it is buying, Amazon would need 900Gbit/sec for their exit and no one at the vendor is going to blink at making Amazon pay higher price than Kmod Hosting.
E.g bandwidth costs on AWS are high enough that if you actually serve up lots of data from S3 you can typically afford to rent servers to cache all of it 'in front' of AWS and still save a ton of money.
S3 only gets close to competitive if you never access the data from outside of AWS.
Which gets to the point: If you use an AWS service like S3, you pretty much has to use other AWS services if you want the cost to be even somewhat reasonable in aggregate.
They don't need to compete on cost, because once they get you to buy into one set of services, moving any one set of services off AWS gets more painful and/or costly, and a full migration looks too scary for most people.
S3 will never be priced to undercut anything but big players for that reason. They need to be competitive with Google and Azure, because those guys can offer to offset transitioning costs and generally aggressively target AWS customers.
A small player isn't the same threat even if substantially cheaper.
This post is intended to address people who do not feel that decentralization can be cost effective at scale.
https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia - this support article is also a good introduction to the network and why it was built
Also take a look at Skynet, a file sharing protocol built on top of Sia: https://siasky.net/
As someone who has worked with a couple of market leaders in their respective fields i want to disssaude anyone who would listen of this notion. NO, the market leaders aren't doing things optimally. Some things are downright stupid.
