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Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.
AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.
This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.
People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.
In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.
AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.
1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.
Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.
The "free" offerings are an old story by now.
It's also fantastic to read the misconceptions of the "value" AWS is providing. In some cases they do provide a much greater value over cost ratio, but if you've convinced yourself that blindly for AWS proper as a whole - boy do I feel for you the day you realize the economic advantage they manipulate to monopolize the cloud market, and not for the greater good of their customers.
Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again - his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear. It's laughable that anyone would publicly make that statement at this point in time knowing what we know. Sure, if you're running a static site on S3 for a few users a month I'm sure you've got it covered. For those of us dealing with large scale enterprise everything stated here is, at best, bending the truth and at worst flat out ignorance.
Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.
Many of Corey's technical posts are around finding sweet technical substitutes for niche use cases, but as I'm sure he'll tell you, 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.
> as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market
Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like. One of the reasons this may not have happened yet is because Cloudflare's whole presentation is consumer oriented, starting with domain configuration management that is hell to version correctly when 20 people have access to the account. Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.
Nobody is actively encouraging the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought. This makes zero sense. Why would an organization pay a business to reduce their AWS costs if it wasn't worth the cost to realize the savings? Cost optimization is an easy task, as you've stated - so the cost/value proposition of a business like The Duckbill Group must not be worth it according to your statement. Yet they exist and do, seemingly, well. Maybe... Just maybe, cost optimization in AWS is not easy, not straightforward, and designed to be painful enough to where smart engineers are incented to leverage Amazon's dark patterns of hiding costs at time of deployment.
You even state...
> 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.
So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy? Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?
> Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like.
Let's take a stroll back in time. Do you think that Amazon and AWS have always posted a profit? Go look, they've posted many quarterly losses to get where they're at. That's how it works as you build a business like that. To your point - AWS does compete directly with Cloudflare in certain products, yet here we are, Cloudflare and AWS both continue to grow (negative operating income / net income are not a direct correlation of company growth BTW). A mistake you've made is around brand and reputation. Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company. Customers continue to buy Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler and, yes, Cloudflare - even though AWS offers some overlapping portfolio. Why? AWS isn't viewed as a security portfolio. Cloudflare has brand reputation in security and content distribution. And it's a pivot that easily works with both their brand and reputation.
> Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.
This just screams of the competitive argument low-road. I don't have ties to Amazon or AWS. I'm not an employee. When I read statements like this it's affirmation that there's some agenda. I laughed out loud reading that as the closing argument, thanks for that.
Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.
> Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?
Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.
> Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company
They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government. CloudFlare on the other hand, to this day, default to MITMing SSL connections for new accounts and downgrading them to cleartext en route to the back end. It seems our perceptions differ wildly.
If you don't think AWS bandwidth pricing is something in the real world I don't know what to say :) AWS is now broken out in Amazon financials - worth a look to see what they are raking in and the margins they are getting in the real world :)
"Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again"
His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public. For a service like cloudflare (ie, call for pricing / dealing with a salesperson trying to figure out how much they can squeeze you for on upfront or on renewal) this type of service is much harder.
In short, if your bill is too high, you can talk to someone like Corey and they can probably help you bring it down.
This comment confirms that you have a misunderstanding of how organizations can and have bought bandwidth via high-cap Internet offerings in the real world given how you've misunderstood my argument completely. My point is that organizations like AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, and many, many organizations around the world still buy Internet connectivity this way (directly). My unchanged statement, all along, has been regarding the egregious margins AWS makes on bandwidth that they charge for in a very asymmetric and oversubscribed manner. It's hard to have an conversation about these things when the basis for how businesses operate aren't understood by those making comments, unfortunately.
> His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public.
I'm not sure how many enterprise agreements you've helped derive or review, but you can get agreed pricing from any cloud vendor - Cloudflare included. If you're spending any amount monthly beyond what appears to be a personal account this is not your issue.
