> It's hard to come to a firm conclusion since pricing data is held very secretly (AWS quickly deletes announcements of historical price decreases).<p>That's not correct. Here is the history of every (properly tagged) price reduction AWS ever announced: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction/</a>
AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]:<p>- Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications.<p>- m6i is same price as m5, but new generation of CPU and increased network performance.<p>- gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 and has better baseline performance. It can also scale performance independently of size, so no more overprovisioning storage to hit a certain IOPS.<p>- S3 has IA, Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive, all offering cheaper storage but more expensive retrieval.<p>Not defending AWS here, just noting that they don't seem to be interested in direct price reductions anymore.<p>(EDIT: Previously I stated gp3 and gp2 were the same price. Thanks zerocrates and maxxam for the correction.)
Storage price reductions slowing down or even coming to a halt makes me wonder what this means for "infinite storage" companies.<p>I'm talking services like Facebook, Youtube, that are "free" (ad supported) where on a daily basis an absurd amount of new content is added, yet almost nothing ever removed.<p>If storage needs grow endlessly yet storage costs stopped going down, wouldn't that mean that the model in the long term is unsustainable? Sure you can delay the inevitable (compress content, move old stuff to cold storage) but ultimately storage costs per user goes up whilst income likely does not.
The main issue we have with S3 is the extortionary egress bandwidth fee. Storage pricing seems OK, but what's the point if I can't send those files to users?
Hard disks have been getting larger capacity but i/o capability is fairly flat. The result is that price/GB is dropping but price/iops is not. So _cold_ storage is where you would expect to see pricing fall. I don't follows AWS pricing closely but I've seen a lot of news around Glacier over the year so that might reflect this fact.
Well, at least AWS has not increased the price like GCP did: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce</a>
The R2 vs S3 story is pretty interesting. For archival use cases, S3 still wins by a mile, but for running apps, R2 often wins (minus lacking features).<p>I wrote up my findings here: <a href="https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison" rel="nofollow">https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison</a>
For my company, neither egress nor storage cost are the big issue. It’s the API call (PUT) cost.<p>We deal with payloads that are just a little too big for a database (we run Postgres and Clickhouse) but just too frequent (~100 per second) and small (think largish json blobs) to be effective on S3.<p>We are write heavy. Reads are probably 1% but need to be instant for a good UI and API experience.
I cannot speak for the big companies, but for private cloud storage, I suggest to go the route for self-hosting, all the tools are available in 2022: ZFS for reliability, Proxmox for separation of concerns, Opnsense/pfsense for access control, Nextcloud for convenience (if you need such file sync at all). Add a
photovoltaic plant and your electricity bill will be _Ok_ (you should do this anyway).<p>I have a 40 TB ZFS Z2 Pool consisting of 6x 8TB drives, and a 16TB offsite pool that is booted for backup snapshots weekly. You'll have to replace the 6 drives running 24/7 approximately every 5 years. If a drive costs $200.00, that will be $1200.00 per 5 years, or $20.00 per month. Add about $400.00 (with PV) to $800.00 (without) for electricity per year ($30.00/$60.00 monthly) and $7.00 monthly for UPS batteries. For these $57.00, you will get a full virtualization feature set under your control, not only a 30TB ingress data sink.<p>With Amazon Glacier, the cheapest "data sink" cloud storage, 30TB would equal $123.00 monthly (or $30.00 with S3 Glacier Deep Archive), with quite a few feature caveats.
It looks like storage costs haven’t changed much since the last S3 price reduction five years ago.<p>My other take on this is that given how slowly HDD costs are going down at this point, tape is going to remain relevant for some consumers for a lot longer than many of us thought.
Cloudflare's entry into this market will be interesting no bandwidth costs might put real pressure on AWS to get reasonable with it's pricing.<p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/</a>
As a European I take not getting many times as expensive, like our fuel, energy and food prices. I wonder how the European cloud will fare this winter, and how many European customers we will lose.
> Even with a slowdown of Moore's Law, it seems like AWS has a healthy margin to continue to offer strategic price cuts only when necessary.<p>Which doesn't surprise me much, really. If your customers are mostly stuck with you, competition is sparse and people pay the price you demand - why would you reduce prices?
Has anyone had any direct experience between S3 and Backblaze for the basic usecase of uploading and downloading files?<p><a href="https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html</a><p>Is just radically different.
Theirs other options available depending on your risk appetite.<p>For example, I built a file sharing tool (<a href="https://www.fileyeet.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fileyeet.io/</a>) off the back of Storj (<a href="https://www.storj.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.storj.io/</a>) which is a distributed file storage backed by a crypto coin (maybe one of the <i>few</i> legitimate uses of crypto, although I'm not convinced yet).<p>Storj was a much cheaper option than S3 although I do have to trust that their systems are as secure as the advertise them to be. Likewise, R2 seems like a good "in-between" option.<p>Both R2 and Storj share the S3 API for integrating with them.
I suspect it might be an issue of "cheap enough". For smaller Projects, the s3 storage cost doesn't matter too much. Medium sized projects may find the tradeoff between price vs cost of a custom solution to still be more than good enough. Large enough projects simply chose a different, more specialized solution anyway
> Yet, AWS S3 pricing hasn't decreased as fast as the underlying storage costs.
> […]
> Another blog post analyzes the same theory for compute and finds a similar story using pricing data from AWS EC2.<p>AWS used to do frequent price reductions years ago. At a certain point they seem to have stopped doing that and are now only doing them rarely. That's really a shame as there are still a lot of AWS offerings which are priced way too high (data transfer being the most prominent one).<p>It'll be interesting to see if and up to which point AWS will keep the prices stable with raising inflation.
Besides storage cost, S3 API access cost can also be high if frequently accessed. And latency is unpredictable.<p>You can use SeaweedFS Remote Object Store Gateway to cache S3 (or any S3 API compatible vendors) to local servers, and access them at local network speed, and asynchronously sync back to S3.<p><a href="https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/wiki/Gateway-to-Remote-Object-Storage" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/wiki/Gateway-to-Remot...</a>
Like the other comments mentioned your post misses of how transparent AWS has been in price reductions in the past.<p>More importantly, S3 now has several tiers of pricing depending on how frequently you access the data. So maybe lately they haven’t reduced the pricing of the top tier of S3 but they’ve made it significantly cheaper for other use cases of data. That is very contrary to the comments being made of innovators dilemma.<p>(I used to work at AWS but have no knowledge about pricing decisions)
This is eventually why every cloud migration will eventually get undone: As cloud providers dial up the profit margins, going on prem will be a no-brainer.
If you account for IOPS and not just on Cost / GB. The pricing structure of HDD hasn't changed a bit in years. Especially when S3 ( Blue Spot ) used to be way above HDD Cost Per GB price.<p>So while I do agree with AWS pricing structure has changed in recent years. I dont see how the Data shown correlate to that conclusion.
I’m sure AWS’s margins are growing on S3, but to be fair, S3 is more than just raw storage. The majority of the cost and value is the API and the ever-growing features it provides. Those aren’t getting cheaper nearly as fast as the underlying storage hardware is.
It looks like the most recent data point, S3 was actually cheaper than the raw storage, while providing 11 9's of durability, across multiple AZs. Still looks like a pretty good deal, as the price of storage has mostly flatlined in this graph.<p>Nor does this even account for cold storage, or reduced redundancy.