Blogarithms

Amazon’s latest change in its pricing for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an indication of their plans for the future. Specifically, it suggests that they’re focusing on customers who will aggregate/resell AWS services. First is the new tiered pricing for bandwidth, reduced from a flat rate of $0.20/GB downloaded to as little as $0.13/GB over 50TB. For the first time this offers a margin for  aggregators. Second is the segregation of charges for HTTP requests: $0.01 per 10,000 GETs, for example. (10x as much for PUT or LIST requests.) The implication is that Amazon’s per-transaction requests are the issue when the payloads are small. But just breaking out these costs reminds us that AWS isn’t an end-user retail offering. Can you imagine the average web-site owner trying to understand what this is all about? Amazon understands that their market is for developers and sophisticated resellers.