Reference entries (19)
- reference Caveats: AWS vendor framing quarantined; build-vs-buy vendor cost pages flagged; DrPeering single-source; sysadmin wages needs-verification
- reference Magnitude summary: storage ~85% / 7×; compute ~20×; bandwidth ~240×; plus the capex→opex structural shift
- reference Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap
- reference NYT 2007/2008 EC2 archive job — one engineer ran OCR on the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200
- reference The structural shift: capex (server + sysadmin) → opex (managed service, administration included)
- reference Network & Computer Systems Administrator BLS median: ~$51K–$58K (early 2000s, needs-verification) rising to $96,800 (May 2024)
- reference Pre-cloud dedicated/colocation pricing 2004–2007 — managed dedicated $250–$1,400/month; budget $89–$199; 1U colo ~$50/month
- reference AWS Lambda previewed November 13, 2014; GA April 9, 2015 — code with no servers to provision
- reference Amazon RDS announced October 2009 (MySQL first); GA May 31, 2011 — managed DB absorbs admin/backup/failover
- reference Current AWS S3/EC2 egress ~$0.09/GB to internet, first 100GB/month free
- reference Internet transit collapsed from $1,200/Mbps (1998) to ~$5/Mbps (2010) — ~240× per DrPeering/Norton series
- reference AWS "we've cut prices 100+ times since 2006" framing — quarantined as vendor self-congratulation
- reference EC2 per-second billing introduced October 2, 2017 — replacing hourly increments in place since 2006
- reference EC2 entry price fell from $0.10 to ~$0.005/instance-hour by 2018 — ~20× cheaper at the floor (Jeff Barr, HashiConf)
- reference Amazon EC2 launched as limited public beta August 25, 2006 — single m1.small instance at $0.10/hour
- reference S3 storage cost fell ~85% from launch — ~7× more data for the same dollar; independently corroborated
- reference S3 Standard ~$0.023/GB in 2025/2026 (first 50TB), tiering to $0.021/GB
- reference Amazon S3 launched March 14, 2006 at $0.15/GB — object storage as a metered utility
- reference Research brief: the falling cost floor of "real" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026)
