Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes, and it would be really shitty to charge for DDoS attacks. As far as I can tell, with the exception of some really expensive network environments (e.g. China), nobody has ever charged for ingress.
With an exception to OVH, none of the cheap providers the article has listed have any kind of backbone network. They all rely fully on transit providers. Turns out backbone networks are expensive to operate!
OVH is the sole example of a provider that has a backbone network, and admittedly, it's pretty good. However, nowhere near expansive as the big three, and it falls flat in Asia (which is the hardest to route traffic in). Also OVH has to build datacenters so cheaply that one of them burnt to the ground in recent years...
(Cloudflare has a backbone too, but you have to pay a lot extra to use it. Linode uses the Akamai backbone now but that's a very recent acquisition and it's expected that Akamai will eventually raise costs significantly)
Yes, bandwidth is way too expensive on cloud providers. AWS Lightsail is proof of that. However, I see no reason to believe that this is purely for vendor locking, and nobody has been able to give any evidence of causation between the two beyond "well it's so expensive!!!"
It is very simple. If you move your data off cloud provider X, cloud provider X is losing revenue because you are doing things with your data off their platform.
They therefore charge high fees to move your data off the platform to discourage this behavior. Meaning you now need to use cloud provider X’s services to do anything with the data.
Attempts at vendor lock-in have been core to software service companies since they were born.
> It is very simple. If you move your data off cloud provider X, cloud provider X is losing revenue because you are doing things with your data off their platform.
Right but if this were the case then why does the Bandwidth Alliance allow you to move data at a much lower cost for 2/3 of the major cloud providers? If they _really_ cared so much about not allowing you to do processing with a third party, the Bandwidth Alliance wouldn't exist!
AWS is the sole hold-out here, and I think the way that Cloudflare worded this makes it pretty clear that the Bandwidth Alliance is basically a middle finger to AWS than anything else, but it also seems clear that the cloud companies aren't actively trying to make it costly to do data processing on a third party.
Egress toll is not about preventing migration off-platform. It's about preventing operation off-platform. They don't want you to come to GCP for a single product like Spanner or BigQuery or some high-tech ML/AI offering while most of your infra runs in big dumb baremetals at the Hetzner or OVH datacenter down the street. If you're coming for Spanner, you also have to buy their overpriced VMs, object storage, log storage and whatever else you need. That's where the real money is made.
Bandwidth alliance looks to be a political tool for cloud providers to save face. Not dissimilar to public companies paying token tribute to ESG which is all the rage these days.
> Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes
That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress.
You pay for everything. Either directly or indirectly. Indirectly often turns out to be much more expensive.
> That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress.
What I'm referring to is the practice of balancing peering ratios. That is, when you make transit/peering arrangements with other ISPs, some ISPs will charge more if the amount of data you're sending to them vs the amount of data you're receiving from them is not balanced. It is in Google's best financial interest to at least try to balance their pipes in this way.
With an exception to OVH, none of the cheap providers the article has listed have any kind of backbone network. They all rely fully on transit providers. Turns out backbone networks are expensive to operate!
OVH is the sole example of a provider that has a backbone network, and admittedly, it's pretty good. However, nowhere near expansive as the big three, and it falls flat in Asia (which is the hardest to route traffic in). Also OVH has to build datacenters so cheaply that one of them burnt to the ground in recent years...
(Cloudflare has a backbone too, but you have to pay a lot extra to use it. Linode uses the Akamai backbone now but that's a very recent acquisition and it's expected that Akamai will eventually raise costs significantly)
Yes, bandwidth is way too expensive on cloud providers. AWS Lightsail is proof of that. However, I see no reason to believe that this is purely for vendor locking, and nobody has been able to give any evidence of causation between the two beyond "well it's so expensive!!!"