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Comment by adrianmacneil | Hacker News Reader

I wish AWS would stop launching new services, and spend some time improving the usability and features of their existing services. So many of their products feel half finished, and could be so much better if they invested more time in improving them rather than trying to compete with every cloud service out there.

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A lot of Amazon services seem to be "improved" by reducing prices (so, better hardware or technology underneath the hood).

But I entirely agree; it's a good time for Amazon to look at the suite of products and make them a tad more cohesive. It can be a bit disjointed at times, especially when trying to tie multiple services together.

I wonder if the drivers are:

* Culture of always having to be seen to innovate

* (Percieved) Competition to keep launching new features to stay ahead

With that said there have been improvements; for example EFS building on top of EBS.

The price drop that really gets me is EBS snapshot pricing. It's 3x the cost of the S3 storage that it is built upon, and it didn't used to be.

This, combined with the dearth of reasonably priced instances with large on-instance storage, artificially inflates our bills to the point that we're seriously considering abandoning AWS. just EBS snapshots are a full percent of our revenue.

My biggest gripe with snapshots is there is no actual way to see how much each snapshot consumes in S3. There is no Cloudwatch metric or any other way to see per snapshot or even per volume. Sure, there is a billing per region but that's just not granular enough. And we had snapshots for how many years? As for the price, when did it more than tripled? I don't remember any blog or tweet or any other announcement. Anybody got a link?

The lack of visibility into per-snapshot cost is insane. We had a problem with the old deduplication process that meant that identically timed snapshots for identical servers with identical data could sometimes cost more than 2x the others. We only found this because we happened to have more the expensive volumes in one region than the others, so our snapshot bill was mysteriously $10k/month higher in that region.

We have essentially no idea how much many of our backups actually cost.

The price didn't triple, what happened was they dropped S3 pricing substantially but never dropped snapshot pricing, even though it's based on S3.

EFS is still in preview 6 months later since announcement. Let's see if it goes GA during reInvent.

I'm just hoping for NFS 4.1 support so that I can start using it on my Windows Server 2012R2 instances. Currently, EFS uses NFS 4.0 which is incompatible with NFS 4.1 for some reason. :(

Really hoping it does...

Noone ever got promoted over "making a service better!". Maybe we should change that :).

if it's bad enough (i.e. threatening the business or at risk of losing customer trust), you can and will be promoted after making things better.

I would like Amazon to keep introducing third-gen cloud services like Lambda and API Gateway.

Polishing up stuff like EC2 to make DevOps easier is great. Creating things like Lambda to make NoOps possible is better, and the two activities should not be mutually exclusive.

> Creating things like Lambda to make NoOps possible is better

I think its hilarious that there's an idea of NoOps. That's like thinking you can automate software development to machine learning.

Looks like this should have really been Cloudfront feature instead of it's own service. It only works with Cloudfront after all. Is that so it does not appear like a "price increase of Cloudfront"?

Isn't it for ELBs as well?

Is there any indication that it is? From WAF doc: "AWS WAF is a web application firewall that lets you monitor the HTTP and HTTPS requests that are forwarded to Amazon CloudFront and lets you control access to your content. Based on conditions that you specify, such as the IP addresses that requests originate from or the values of query strings, CloudFront responds to requests either with the requested content or with an HTTP 403 status code (Forbidden). You can also configure CloudFront to return a custom error page when a request is blocked."

So, yeah, it's a CLoudfront feature.

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