I often find Amazon pricing to be vague and cryptic, sometimes there's literally no way to tell ehy, for example, your database cost is fluctuating all the time
It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations.
The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more.
Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.
The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards.
A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...
Not a bug, a feature.
I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
Most small business I have dealt with use AWS do just need a VPS. If they are willing to move to a scary unknown supplier I suggest (unknown to them, very often one that would be well known to people on HN) then I suggest AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing - it significantly cheaper than an instance plus storage, just from buying them bundled (which, to be fair to Amazon, is common practice).
My own stuff goes on VPSs.
Except it is still Amazon and subject to the same weird billing practices. I once terminated a Lightsail instance and they kept charging me, claiming that I didn't terminate the static IP address associated with it. The IP address itself cost the same as the instance + IP address did.
Now, that would make sense in "real" AWS, but you'd expect it to be more straightforward with a simplified service like Lightsail.
At that point wouldn't it simply be cheaper to do VMs?
I think a lot of people are missing a key part of the wording of my comment, that capitalised for emphasis "IFF" (which means "if and only if").
I am absolutely certain a lot of people would save money using VMs - or at scale bare metal.
IMO a lot of people are using AWS because it is a "safe" choice management buy into that is not expensive in context (its not a big proportion of costs).
The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles. AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale. The problem is that scaling on expertise isn’t instant and that’s where you’re more likely to make a careless mistake and deploy something relatively costly.
This:
> The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles
makes me doubt this:
> AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale.
If you can afford the large fixed cost of vertical integration, it's always cheaper to do things yourself, so the sweet spot for using providers like AWS is scaling down, not up. A managed DB lets you hire a fraction of a sysadmin or devops person from AWS.
The moment you end up paying enough to AWS to hire a sysadmin, you basically are getting an antagonistic sysadmin from AWS, whose primary goal is to make as much money off you as possible. The incentives are not aligned.
What a baffling comment. Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service? You started with one problem and now you have at least two? And what kind of perverse incentive are you creating? Don't you think your "finops" person has a vested interest in preserving their job by ensuring billing complexity will always be there?
Is it, though? At best someone wearing that hat will explain the bill you're getting. What value do you get from that?
To cut costs, either you microoptimize things, of you redesign systems to shed expenses. The former gets you nothing, the latter is not something a "finops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) brings to the table.
I did say it applies IFF and only IFF you choose to use these services, and if you have chosen to use these services you have presumably decided they are good value for money. If not, why are they using AWS.
Of course the complexity and extra cost of managing the billing is something that someone who has chosen to use AWS has already factored in, right?
The alternative is to not use AWS.
If and only if and only if and only if? :)
(also, while on the topic, I think a simple "if" covers it here, since the relationship is not bidirectional)
Absolutely. This was common for complicated services like telecom/long distance even in the pre-cloud days. Big companies would have a staff or hire a service to review telecom bills and make sure they weren’t overpaying.
If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on.
AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file?
While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.