I typed this up a while back right when it hit the forums. So, it's older news now but still worth pushing out I think. I'm still quite interested in doing some deeper analysis of this new service.
Amazon has introduced something called "Requester Pays." My take is that it's a form of peer to peer distributed bandwidth billing that can "scale" from the point of view of a data provider who would otherwise be saddled with those charges. Since bandwidth is basically the new black and everybody wants it but nobody wants to pay for it this is very intresting.
Here is the forum/release note post I grabbed this Amazon Developer forum:
Dear Amazon Web Services developers,
We’re excited to announce a new feature that makes it easy and cost-effective to broadly share data stored in Amazon S3. This will enable you to provide other developers access to your buckets without incurring their access costs, and even use Amazon Web Services to sell data for a profit.
You can now configure an Amazon S3 bucket to bill the requester, rather than you (the bucket owner), for both request and bandwidth fees associated with access to the bucket. Requests against such buckets must be authenticated and bear a header that signifies consent to be billed for the request. Bandwidth between EC2 and S3 within a region remains free of charge when this option is enabled.
Used in conjunction with Amazon DevPay , the new “Requester Pays” option also enables selling access to data stored in Amazon S3 either as a subscription or by marking up individual request fees.
Guidance on getting started:
- Using Amazon S3 “Requester Pays” Option
- Using Amazon S3 “Requester Pays” with Amazon DevPay
Thanks,
The Amazon S3 Team
Amazon seems intent on creating ways to make it more possible to start with less each and every day. But, of course they still get their cut. This is just fine because they provide an excellent service all around.
Hopefully the AWS teams is paying close attention to the stories popping up here and there about AWS bill shock. There needs to be a self-serve way to limit through plan, self-imposed caps, or something the charges. Yes, this comes with down sides, but at the moment it's not all that tough to beat up an AWS client financially by using the compute resources they pay for on-demand and there is little they can do.