Sure there is. AWS has a vested interest in the value of IPv4 going down as much as possible.
Owning IPv4 addresses is a requirement of AWS’s core business. Unless people stop using IPv4, then AWS cannot sell those addresses. There is no incentive for the addresses to increase in value.
Further, if people continue to use IPv4, then AWS has to continue to acquire even more IPv4, and AWS wants the price of those to go down so that acquiring them is cheaper (or wants people to stop using IPv4 so that they can stop spending money on them altogether).
It’s not just a reward for the business travelers. My previous consulting company actually would want us to book our preferred airlines (even if they were more expensive, but only within a certain range) because in the event of an issue with the flight, the perks to rebook or get free checked bags etc actually saved the company/client money.
I saw this for real when traveling with a coworker when they had status and I didn’t. One of our flights was delayed, leading to me being stranded overnight and have to get the company to pay an additional $300 to stay in a hotel, while my statused coworker was rebooked with priority on a flight home due to their status.
It’s disingenuous to call it a “perk”. It’s not the same as having office coffee or a ping pong table at the office.
Having to travel a lot is a known disadvantage of having one of these jobs. The ability to accrue miles or do in-lieu travel is touted as an offsetting factor for this. It’s literally mentioned as a part of the compensation package at places like job fairs or in interviews. In my past consulting job (and on places like r/consulting), people would literally calculate the dollar value of the miles/status you can accrue and would use it to compare compensation packages.
Losing this “perk” is more akin to having commission pay be a big part of your compensation, but then being told you’ll no longer get commission. It’s a material difference to what you expect to be paid.
> which is kind of interesting...as you would think that the security-minded people work on that tool.
I work in security at a company with similar tools and unfortunately I think this is an incorrect assumption.
Security people aren’t necessarily good developers, and good developers aren’t necessarily good security people. And being “security minded” really isn’t good enough.
At the end of the day, the team building the product has the first and foremost priority of launching the product. This always means cutting corners, or not going as deep as might be necessary for certain issues like this, even if they are “security minded”. You really have to have a checks-and-balances on this by having a dedicated security team that has a priority of first and foremost not allowing security vulnerabilities to make it into launched products.
I’m not sure if GitLab has that or not, I’m just saying that wouldn’t make any assumptions about the security posture of a feature just because it’s a “security feature”. If anything I’d be more wary of them, because in my experience there actually can be an attitude of “my shit doesn’t stink” among people developing security products.
> AWS does not have a 100% similar VM, but you could have something close for ~ 20,000 USD monthly. Not that bad.
Is that the on-demand cost, or the reserved cost? For comparing to buying a server outright, you should be comparing the reserved cost. I’m not sure exactly which instances you’re looking at to get $20k/mo, but I see some instances with 64-128 cores/1-2 TB memory for <10k/month.
For storage, I’m not sure how you’re getting >100k… I plugged in the highest IOPS I could for io2 volumes for 150 TB of storage and got 30k/mo. Also worth considering here that you don’t have to provision all 150 TB up front - you could start with 5 TB and increase in size as you grow, for example.
Still gonna be hella expensive but all of this changes the calculus quite a bit from your estimates.
Owning IPv4 addresses is a requirement of AWS’s core business. Unless people stop using IPv4, then AWS cannot sell those addresses. There is no incentive for the addresses to increase in value.
Further, if people continue to use IPv4, then AWS has to continue to acquire even more IPv4, and AWS wants the price of those to go down so that acquiring them is cheaper (or wants people to stop using IPv4 so that they can stop spending money on them altogether).