The free inbound transfer is NOT permanent. From the post:
"Finally, we are waiving the inbound data transfer fee across the board (for all services) through the end of June 2010."
It's nice, but let's not kid ourselves about its awesomeness.
Prediction: at the end of June, they'll magically realize that they can do this permanently and they fix the free inbound traffic, or at least have a healthy free amount before payment is started. This means there will be another round of news for them.
The free inbound transfer is obviously a reaction to Microsoft's pricing. Windows Azure has free inbound transfer during off-peak hours until June 30 (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/#pricing).
At any reasonable scale, S3 bandwidth is still a magnitude more expensive than you would pay at an aggressive dedicated server company like ServerBeach, ThePlanet, 10tb.com, or SoftLayer. It's also even worse when you compare it to discount bandwidth offerings like Cogent's $1,500 for a GigE (which comes out to $0.0075/GB) or Hurricane Electric's $3k price for a GigE connection.
What Amazon is really doing here is the classic ISP inbound/outbound juggling act amongst public peers. In order to maintain a peering relationship, especially at the scales that Amazon must see with it's cloud services, providers really need to maintain an equitable inbound/outbound ratio, otherwise agreements become void and they actually start charging each other.
i guess free inbound is cool if you're using S3 as just a huge backup dump for all of your stuff, but it would seem that running any sort of web app that serves as a public customer interface wouldn't benefit much at all from free inbound
I guess they buy their bandwidth symmetrically. Thus, as long as they have more outgoing traffic they can charge for, giving incoming away for free doesn't really 'cost' them much (off-course the do lose income on this, but not real costs). It's still nice tho! :)
It would be nice if they included PUT's into this equation too. Many large datasets are not one big file, but billions of smaller ones.
I realise it raises the offering out of the bandwidth arena and into actual server capacity to handle the PUT's, but offering free bandwidth in and still charging per PUT action is kinda misleading (and could really ruin someones day if they read it wrong)
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 25.3 ms ] thread"Finally, we are waiving the inbound data transfer fee across the board (for all services) through the end of June 2010."
It's nice, but let's not kid ourselves about its awesomeness.
Prediction: at the end of June, they'll magically realize that they can do this permanently and they fix the free inbound traffic, or at least have a healthy free amount before payment is started. This means there will be another round of news for them.
What Amazon is really doing here is the classic ISP inbound/outbound juggling act amongst public peers. In order to maintain a peering relationship, especially at the scales that Amazon must see with it's cloud services, providers really need to maintain an equitable inbound/outbound ratio, otherwise agreements become void and they actually start charging each other.
And by the way, Softlayer has permanently free inbound traffic for all their servers, including cloudlayer ones.
I realise it raises the offering out of the bandwidth arena and into actual server capacity to handle the PUT's, but offering free bandwidth in and still charging per PUT action is kinda misleading (and could really ruin someones day if they read it wrong)