Comment by boiler_up800

boiler_up800 Mar 31, 2023 parent

It’s not just BigQuery. Pricing for cloud services is increasing across every provider. Azure increased prices in the EU recently https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2023/01/05/consistent-glob...

For AWS, one of the people behind https://ec2instances.info showed that the price/performance ratio for newer instances is rising, https://github.com/patmyron/cloud/#compute--memory-unit-pric... meaning cloud users are paying more for less.

electroly Mar 31, 2023

Well hold on now. AWS has never, to my knowledge, increased prices for an existing service. They'll introduce new EC2 instance types that aren't as cheap as you were expecting, but the existing types you're already using don't get more expensive. Nobody gets hit with a price increase unless they choose to switch types. If you keep doing the same thing, you'll keep getting the same prices.

On the other hand, this Google BigQuery price increase is a real, honest-to-god price hike for existing customers. If you keep doing the same thing, the cost will change.

Havoc Mar 31, 2023

> AWS has never, to my knowledge, increased prices for an existing service.

Really? Seems semi-plausible but still surprising

klohto Mar 31, 2023

AWS has never raised their prices

tyingq Mar 31, 2023

They've consistently lowered them. But that makes sense, as they want as many companies to go all-in as possible. Because the egress is still egregiously high, there's terrific lock-in for big clients. They wouldn't raise prices until the exact right moment.

crop_rotation Mar 31, 2023

AWS has never increased prices though, like since they started. Atleast I can't find any references to any price increase. The link showing "price/performance ratio for newer instances is rising" is deceptive. It just shows vcpu/hour, which doesn't really measure real world performance. Like m5.large is a significant performance improvement over m4.large. Newer instances also carry improvements not shown in the link.

cperciva Mar 31, 2023

S3 prices increased dramatically for some workloads when AWS introduced per-request fees.

Admittedly that was a very long time ago, but it has happened.

jefftk Mar 31, 2023

That's right -- on 2007-06-01 they switched from:

    Data Transfer
    -------------
    $0.20 per GB - data uploaded
    $0.20 per GB - data downloaded

to:

    Data Transfer
    -------------
    $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

    $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
    $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
    $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

    Requests
    -------------
    $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
    $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
    (No charge for delete requests)

While keeping storage at $0.15 per GB-Month.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20070502160305/http://www.amazon... (can't find the announcement page)

cperciva Apr 1, 2023

Thanks, I had a feeling it was in 2007 but I couldn't remember the exact date.

Aeolun Mar 31, 2023

I think the fact that change has already disappeared from our collective memory means people weren’t too bothered.

Meanwhile, Google can’t seem to take a step without tripping over a price increase.

cperciva Apr 1, 2023

It hasn't disappeared from my memory! There were people who did very, umm, "creative" things with S3 (classic example, creating a virtual disk by storing each 512-byte sector as an S3 object) who suddenly changed direction after the pricing changed.

I agree that AWS does much better than Google though -- the S3 change was a big wakeup call to them about pricing all the dimensions rather than assuming people will use a service the same way as Amazon uses it internally.

re-thc Mar 31, 2023

They haven't and agree at the end of the day over the years performance has increased and price has decreased especially with Graviton.

jonathannorris Mar 31, 2023

AWS Spot instance prices are going wild: https://twitter.com/jonathannorris/status/164072721401353011...

londons_explore Mar 31, 2023

Interesting that the differential between different regions is remaining the same.

You would imagine that if some big user were slurping up all the spot instances worldwide, then it would level out regional pricing differences. Or, if not level it out, change it based on that users sensitivity to bandwidth costs in/out of each region.

That makes me think that the spot pricing change is a gradual AWS algorithm change instead - I'm sure they'd be smart enough to apply a pricing change with some smooth function based on date.

Matumio Mar 31, 2023

You can shop around a bit for AWS for spot instances. Spot prices in eu-west-3 (Paris) are not that wild yet for the same c5a instances. Somteimes, a region has all its spot instances near the on-demand price. At least they seem to be smoothing out their changes over days. (I think it used to be more wild in the past.)

Aeolun Mar 31, 2023

> Somteimes, a region has all its spot instances near the on-demand price.

That happens? I’ve pretty consistently had all spot prices at 30-40% of on-demand.

re-thc Mar 31, 2023

The problem is there's been growing demand across the world and/or more people optimizing costs and moving from on-demand -> spot. It's not a single user doing this.

There were hardware shortages earlier. I think it's just a case of AWS can't expand fast enough to meet demand for now.

jlogsdon Apr 1, 2023

Important to note that AWS doesn’t control spot prices: it’s a market where you bid on what you’re willing to pay. Customers control the cost through their bids.

edit; and prices tend to surge at end of quarter, regardless of provider. I’ve seen that for years at AWS and it’s only increased year over year.

apocalyptic0n3 Mar 31, 2023

Akamai Cloud/Linode has a significant price increase going into effect tomorrow as well https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/akamai_cloud_computing_pr...

re-thc Mar 31, 2023

They just copied Digital Ocean.

wankle Mar 31, 2023

Actually Lightsail halved their prices a few years ago.

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