> Some cloud providers charge a round zero for intra-region traffic

That's likely a selling point to attract people to the competition. "Look, our bandwidth is free!"

Also there is quite a lot of cost for internal, inter-zone, traffic. You need all the routing equipment and the fiber links for that. And such traffic does not go through the same links as the public one, because you'd be paying the cost of public bandwidth trough transits or peerings. You want your own backbone, but this has a cost that needs to be amortized. Furthermore, properly designing such a network has a cost in engineers.

It's not just a selling point, it's a reflection on how providers see customers. I've been struck when using other platforms (OCI, some PaaSes) that it feels a lot more like a partnership, where everybody makes money when I succeed, than a short-horizon extraction machine. And sure, maybe they'd change their minds in AWS's position...but they're not, and maybe nobody should be allowed to be as big as AWS?

OCI also doesn't charge for NAT gateways, which makes sense because it's a configuration in a router that already exists and is already doing things. AWS, on the other hand, brings out the knives for you.

Do you think OCI would keep that pricing if they where the leader? Just check Oracle history for milking customers

What does that have to do with literally anything, except excusing anticompetitive and extractive behavior because somebody else might hypothetically do it?

They aren't and so they can't. AWS can and should be prevented from doing so.

A single 800Gbit/s port can do 259200000 GB a month. That's 5'184'000$ a month. Their traffic prices are ridiculous and there is no excuse for it.

You're not buying the gigabytes, you're buying the systems engineering that carries those gigabytes.

> you're buying the systems engineering

System engineering is not measured in dollars per byte transfered.

AWS engineers must be horrible because others are able to do it for at least an order of magnitude less.

Or they make more profit.

> That's likely a selling point to attract people to the competition. "Look, our bandwidth is free!"

But bandwidth is free in intra-node traffic, isn't it? I mean, in some scenarios this traffic doesn't even leave the server. What does localhost traffic cost you?

ssssh! If the FTC did their job, the way Cloud providers priced bandwidth would drastically change across the board.

How much does Google pay for bandwidth? What percentage of the backbone do they own/lease/run?

They will just charge you with some other fee.

What's the cost of not having routing equipment and a backbone? At that point they would just be two separate regions which are too geographically close to actually offer redundancy.

You think amzn pays zero for inter-AZ transfer costs over fiber/whatever they don't own?

> You think amzn pays zero for inter-AZ transfer costs over fiber/whatever they don't own?

Some of the traffic doesn't leave the server, let alone the server rack.

I'd wager these costs have zero to do with operational or infrastructure costs, and are just a way to price gouge customers.

The stated purpose of AZ (the A stands for "availability") would suggest that this is not true. If AWS is running AZ foo and bar on the same server rack, then they're not being honest about what an AZ is. I'm not saying that's impossible, but that if they lying about this, that's a bigger problem.

Maybe? The whole thing with running large parts of the internet is that no one can refuse to carry your traffic, and you are able to dictate very favorable conditions.

(Also, whatever they pay, it is not charged in GB-increments.)

They have to pay for fiber running across data centers, the connection costs, switches, etc. It's definitely not free and no the conditions aren't favorable. In a lot of places there's a monopoly on who owns the fiber etc.