Making all in-bound traffic free is a super-aggressive (and much appreciated) move.
As blhack pointed out Voxel's per-GB rate[1] before AWS dropped was extremely competitive, but they charge for in and out-bound data. AWS, after the 1st of July will only charge $0.12 for out-bound data and $0.00 for inbound data, effectively making it something like $0.06/GB compared to Voxel (I'm hand-waving this a bit to make a point).
Also as wiradikusuma pointed out, this comes right on the heals of Google's App Engine pricing structure change[2] to be more business-friendly (read: more expensive/more predictable billing) that upset smaller shops and individuals.
As someone who reads most of the AWS forums every night, I would say overall that Amazon seems to be responding more quickly to low level failures that used to run rampant on the system (although US-EAST still has more failures than any other region. I guess due to overload). They seem like they are hitting faster/smoother, sounds like a good time to push forward and grow which I imagine this move will help do.
Getting a little excited to see what the price decrease for per-GB billing on S3 will be in the coming months following this up (my assumption).
It also makes it really appealing for a lot of data-analysis use cases, which are increasingly being done on EC2, because it's a nice way to burst up to a temporary cluster. That use case often has large inbound traffic, as you pull down datasets (say, some genomics data), but then comparatively little outbound traffic.
Indeed, this is exactly my case: 10-100's GB of data distilled down to 1GB output at most, including extra diagnostics which are not always needed.
One possible advantage for Amazon could be, at least in my use case, that I may be inclined to spin up instances for less-CPU-intensive tasks. Also, being able to rely on the widely available remote access from EC2 is convenient.
I suppose if it gets me spending more time on their CPU cycles, they've picked up business. Interested to see where this policy leads.
It's because of the ratio of reads to writes. For many applications, especially in social/content, the creation traffic is an order of magnitude or two less than the consumption traffic. So free inbound bandwidth is a bit of a rounding error.
Here's a somewhat old article that captures the rule.
Goto facebook, or SO, or HN or youtube or almost any site...open firebug or whatever, and calculate the amount of inbound traffic to the outbound traffic (keep in mind that this is reverse for you and the host). You should notice that your outbound traffic (their inbound), which is mostly short GET headers, is like 1% of your inbound (their outbound).
Sites where you upload a lot of content, like YouTube, still have much, much more reads (outbound) than writes (inbound). Probably by an order of magnitude.
Systems like Dropbox would benefit - though they were already getting different pricing I'm sure. But this is really a tiny fraction of how most online systems work.
As blhack pointed out Voxel's per-GB rate[1] before AWS dropped was extremely competitive, but they charge for in and out-bound data. AWS, after the 1st of July will only charge $0.12 for out-bound data and $0.00 for inbound data, effectively making it something like $0.06/GB compared to Voxel (I'm hand-waving this a bit to make a point).
Also as wiradikusuma pointed out, this comes right on the heals of Google's App Engine pricing structure change[2] to be more business-friendly (read: more expensive/more predictable billing) that upset smaller shops and individuals.
As someone who reads most of the AWS forums every night, I would say overall that Amazon seems to be responding more quickly to low level failures that used to run rampant on the system (although US-EAST still has more failures than any other region. I guess due to overload). They seem like they are hitting faster/smoother, sounds like a good time to push forward and grow which I imagine this move will help do.
Getting a little excited to see what the price decrease for per-GB billing on S3 will be in the coming months following this up (my assumption).
[1] http://www.voxel.net/pricing
[2] http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/app-engine-pricing-changes...