Of course netflix is optimising costs, otherwise it would not be a business, I just think they put much more effort elsewhere. They could be using other words, like "financial discipline" :)
My point is that even if I get 20 times discount on egress its still nowhere close, since i have to buy everything else - compute, storage are more expensive, and even with 5-10x discounts from list price its not worth it.
(Our cloud bills are in the millions as well, I am familiar with what discounts we can get)
We run our own infrastructure, sometimes with our own fincing (4), sometimes external (3). The cost is in tens of millions per year.
When I used to compare to aws, only egress at list price costs as much as my whole infra hosting. All of it.
I would be very interested to understand why netflix does not go 3/4 route. I would speculate that they get more return from putting money in optimising costs for creating original content, rather than cloud bill.
My point is that even if I get 20 times discount on egress its still nowhere close, since i have to buy everything else - compute, storage are more expensive, and even with 5-10x discounts from list price its not worth it.
(Our cloud bills are in the millions as well, I am familiar with what discounts we can get)