On: AWS’s anti-competitive move hidden in plain sight

[ericbarrett]

At a former gig, the Prometheus server cost 10% of the total AWS bill in cross-AZ bandwidth charges alone. We were in a single region.

I have long thought it would be interesting to build a highly economical workload that is cross-region, but which only uses a single AZ in each. Inter-region bandwidth costs a little more, but if all your heavy traffic (monitoring etc.) is local you will save a ton. And since your only failover is cross-region, it should be easier to maintain the ability to do so as an organization. Also no extra exposure to whole-region failures :)

[saurik → ericbarrett]

This is why their new load balancer variants are insidious, as they require you to have instances in multiple availability zones :/.

[playingalong → saurik]

But you don't need to enable cross-AZ traffic. Or to be precise you can disable it (if you give up on some features like stickiness).

[dilyevsky → playingalong]

Only helps if your instances don’t need to talk to each other

[rescbr → dilyevsky]

Instances can still do cross-AZ traffic, this just prevents the incoming load balanced traffic from crossing AZs.

[EamonnMR → saurik]

They did this with managed Kafka too.