The core issue is that OWG don’t release the “full story” and that’s what concerns me the most.
That’s exactly what I mean. The topic wants to know more about OWG AWS costs which are private/hidden.
As per, Estimate cloud costs for 2023 · Issue #788 · openstreetmap/operations · GitHub, those are/were real spendings and the estimation for 2023 was quite on point. The difference between estimation and budget from the attached image, is quite negligable.
Wait until you see how much we spend with equinix (data centres), he.net (ISP) and on physical server hardware. 
I don’t think you quite get the scale of the project.
I can breakdown our cloud usage / expenses / sponsorship once I back on Wednesday and have access to the real data.
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Why do you deflect my questions? I don’t ask about other servers. I ask specifically about the AWS 25,000€ yearly spending. You have deflected my questions numerous times now which does not ease the situation.
Your comments are off-putting, let the person be on holiday and calm down. You’re also deflecting and ignoring the "I can breakdown our cloud usage / expenses / sponsorship once I back on Wednesday " reply you got.
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I won’t be mad if I don’t get an answer for a week or so (I don’t expect I will get an answer today). I am just replying to new posts that come in. Should I stop replying then?
I have nothing to say on that yet, I am patiently waiting for Wednesday.
Hi @NorthCrab, I encourage you to read the guidelines for interacting on the Community forum. As others have said, it’s entirely off-putting to “come in swinging”. If you assume good faith to start with, people will be much more likely to participate in a healthy discussion.
As it is, your messages make people feel defensive and annoyed. Please change your tone of voice before continuing with this thread.
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I am typing on my phone, trying to best answer your questions without being able to login into AWS console.
We have a mountain of backups (secondary + archival), logs (for processing) and live user/gpx/images files used for website. At very least 70TB+. As discussed I can give you real numbers later in the week. Physical hardware might be cheaper, but running it would suck up our limited time, us being an extremely small team.
We are using credits from AWS. We think we will get free credits again but have a budget estimate if we didn’t and spent like we have (on credits). In reality we would find some way to cut back if we did not get credits. Since Jan 2023 our total real AWS expenditure has been $0 due to usage of credits. Azure is around $30/month for translation API used by this forum.
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So 70TB of which:
- 4TB are logs (for processing)
- 65TB are backups
- 1TB others, secondary things
Is that correct? Why are backups taking so much space? Is some deduplication logic applied or are all backups completely separate of each other? Those backups better be good for a 25,000€/y solution 
.
Have you ever considered non-AWS solutions? AWS is in general very expensive. Backblaze is a reputable backup company with years of experience, providing similar API interface, costing just 1/5th of AWS: Cloud Backup Pricing for Veeam, NAS, Servers, and Workstations. Such a simple switch would reduce 25,000€ to a more reasonable ~5,000€ range. A 20% save in total yearly OWG spendings.
Please let me know, otherwise I won’t be able to comply as I can’t really see my wrongdoing here.
How loud do I have to say it: we do not spend $25k/year on AWS. We never have. We might “spend” that in credits that are free to us, but that doesn’t cost us anything.
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I suppose we just have to wait for the exact data because it gets us nowhere. I work only with publicly accessible information, and as shown, it’s quite limited.
I encourage you to read the guidelines that I linked in my post and think about where your posts might not be following the guidelines.
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I already explained that I don’t see my wrongdoing here. I ask you, an external person, to guide me. There is so much text that I, really, don’t know where to start searching. I already know the general guidelines and what sort of discussions may violate them.
You are, once again, misunderstanding what the difference between a budget and actual spend is. We budgeted 24000 EUR, based on the data in the github issue you linked. As called out in the github issue, we knew past expenses would be a poor predictor of future costs and we had insufficient data to come up with a good estimate of AWS costs and called out that the budgeted cost was from the high side of possible costs.
We can’t publish an actual spend for all 2023 until 2023 is over. Our year-to-date AWS spend is 0, because it is covered by credits. We have additional work to reduce the log-related pre-credit costs, but given the limitations of volunteer time, I haven’t prioritized it. A large part of the reason I haven’t prioritized it is we currently have no AWS costs.
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So if you receive 25,000 EUR from OSMF for AWS, and you don’t spend it on AWS, where does it go? 25,000 EUR is quite a substantial amount of money (it’s 1/4th of your total low-budget). This part is not really transparent to me.
Please try a little harder to imagine how others might be viewing your posts.
For example, one of the sections in the guidelines say “Always be Civil” and “Respect each other”. Your post makes assumptions that aren’t respectful of the people that participate in this community. Another way of saying this is “assume good intentions”. You should assume that the people running this project know what they’re doing and have a good understanding of the budget for the project. Instead of making accusations of inappropriate use of funds, maybe you should gather more information and gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on first, then see if there’s opportunities where you can volunteer and help make it better.
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