Azure and the other mega clouds seem to enjoy massive profit margins on bandwidth… why would they willingly drop those prices when they can get away with high prices?
If bandwidth costs are important, there are plenty of options that will let you cut the cost by 10x (or more). Either with a caching layer like an external CDN (if that works for your application), or by moving to any of the mid-tier clouds (if bandwidth costs are an important factor, and caching won’t work for your application).
AWS, GCP, and Azure are the modern embodiment of the phrase “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Most companies don’t benefit from those big 3 mega clouds nearly as much as they think they do.
So, sure, send a note to your Azure rep complaining about the cost of bandwidth… nothing will change, of course, because companies aren’t willing to switch away from the mega clouds.
> and other providers
Other providers, like Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc., do not charge anywhere near the same for bandwidth as Azure. I think they are all about 8x to 10x cheaper.
A CDN will increase your bandwidth costs not lower it.
Eg Fastly prices:
US/Europe $0.10/GB
India $0.28/GB
Not all bandwidth is equal. eg Hetzner will pay for fast traffic into Europe but don't pay the premium that others like AWS do to ensure it gets into Asia uncongested.
BunnyCDN charges significantly less for data that they serve, for example.
I didn’t say all CDNs are cheaper. Some CDNs see an opportunity to charge a premium, and they do!
Fastly sees themselves as far more than just a CDN. They call themselves an “edge cloud platform”, not a CDN.
> Not all bandwidth is equal. eg Hetzner will pay for fast traffic into Europe but don't pay the premium that others like AWS do to ensure it gets into Asia uncongested.
Sure… there are sometimes tradeoffs, but for bandwidth-intensive apps, you’re sometimes (often?) better off deploying regional instances that are closer to your customers, rather than paying a huge premium to have better connectivity at a distance. Or, for CDN-compatible content, you’re probably better off using an affordable CDN that will bring your content closer to your users.
If you absolutely need to use AWS’s backbone for customers in certain geographic regions, there’s nothing stopping you from proxying those users through AWS to your application hosted elsewhere, by choosing the AWS region closest to your application and putting a proxy there. You’ll be paying AWS bandwidth plus your other provider’s bandwidth, but you’ll still be saving tons of money to route the traffic that way if those geographic regions only represent a small percentage of your users… and if they represent a large percentage, then you can host something more directly in their region to make the experience even better.
For many types of applications, having higher latency / lower bandwidth connectivity isn’t even a problem if the data transfer is cheaper and saves money… the application just needs to do better caching on the client side, which is a beneficial thing to do even for clients that are well-connected to the server.
It depends, and I am not convinced there is a one-size-fits-all solution, even if you were to pay through the nose for one of the hyperscalers.
I have plenty of professional experience with AWS and GCP, but I also have professional experience with different degrees of bare metal deployment, and experience with mid-tier clouds. If costs don’t matter, then sure, do whatever.
If bandwidth costs are important, there are plenty of options that will let you cut the cost by 10x (or more). Either with a caching layer like an external CDN (if that works for your application), or by moving to any of the mid-tier clouds (if bandwidth costs are an important factor, and caching won’t work for your application).
AWS, GCP, and Azure are the modern embodiment of the phrase “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Most companies don’t benefit from those big 3 mega clouds nearly as much as they think they do.
So, sure, send a note to your Azure rep complaining about the cost of bandwidth… nothing will change, of course, because companies aren’t willing to switch away from the mega clouds.
> and other providers
Other providers, like Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc., do not charge anywhere near the same for bandwidth as Azure. I think they are all about 8x to 10x cheaper.