AWS changing the game

Changes to free tier making CloudFront very tempting

Over the years my AWS usage has grown and shrank, grown and shrank. One service I used to use forever, was CloudFront, their Content Delivery Network (CDN). It worked well for my needs but sooner or later, CloudFlare entered my life and things changed. This free product that not only did CDN functionality for me, but also had unlimited DDoS mitigation was a combination you simply could not refuse.

However, if you followed my CloudFlare series recently, you would have seen my frustrations with their customer support which has prompted me to reconsider the services that I use. It’s a shame really, but I do have to stick to my principles. Before this latest announcement from AWS, I was already in the process of moving back towards CloudFront. It worked fine for me in the past, it would still have been eons more cheap than some of CloudFlare’s competitors. With a budget of my 20 USD per month that I was spending on CloudFlare Pro, I could include AWS WAF too most likely and regain some of the features that CloudFlare offer, just in the AWS world.

Well just a few days ago, AWS made an announcement that really made my day. Here’s the link to that post for the details, but in short they are

• Increasing the free data transfer for CloudFront to 1TB per month and free HTTP(S) requests to 10,000,000 per month. Also changing this free tier offer to be a forever offer.
• Increasing the free data transfer to the Internet from things like EC2, S3, to be 100 GB per month. This was already a free forever offer

This is I want to guess, a direct response to some gauntlet throwing from CloudFlare on their bandwidth alliance and their new CloudFlare R2 Storage product they announced. This will effectively cover all my previous usage on CloudFlare in terms of HTTP requests and data transfer, while giving me room to explore more bandwidth intense things like say video streaming via CloudFront. The change to EC2 outbound to the Internet is also very welcome. The appeal of things like DigitalOcean compute is their massive bandwidth allowances so while they’re not matching the amount of free bandwidth they offer on Compute (starting at 1TB then increasing with the size of the droplet you pick), it definitely helps with calculating the bill for a project.

So, these changes are effective from December 1st, I’m hoping by then or just before to have some properties moved over back to AWS. I’m looking forward to sharing more on the process since I’m doing things a little bit better now with some Terraform and other good things involved, so stay tuned!