You might have leftover reserve instance that applies, which make the listed price inaccurate. That reservation might even be in a different AWS account in the same organization that you don't have access to. That reservation might not even be there between the time you quote and the time you actually launch it if someone/something did launch before you.
Your organization might also have discounts. I believe some discount may also be very confidential. For example, my reseller policy is that the customer must not be able to see AWS Billing in the organization root account as supposedly the price in that console are the price AWS charged the reseller, while we pay listed price minus any discount we negotiated ourselves.
Finally, I suppose they don't want to have prices shown in multiple places as they will need to update it when prices changes. Doesn't want to risk forgetting one place and getting sued for it. You can see that AWS documentations often do not want to mention the price at all, even if that price is currently free.
Chinese clouds kinda make this simple by making reservation part of the buying machine itself - you have to mark that particular machine as monthly/yearly committed when you start it (or convert it later). The complicated part is recycling instances - if you delete a server before its reservation ends it ends up in a recycle bin that you need to look before making new reservations.
They cannot predict what my bandwidth consumption will be, or other such variable costs. For those, they tell you rates.
That's just for ec2. Everything is like this. Super awesome when you're being brought onto a new project and trying to estimate costs for your client. And let's not forget the little tiny things that should cost nothing. A NAT gateway with no redundancy is $30/mo. That's a fun surprise.
This is the "Comparison Table" from the EC2 launch wizard: https://imgur.com/a/YjFhkzb
The pricing is right there, along with filtering and sorting.
The main reason is this is only true for ec2 and every other resource has its own slightly different way of getting the cost, making it really easy to miss things like this. But here are the steps we take to get to your image.
- First you click compare instance types, and you're brought to a completely different page with a table.
- By default, there is no column for pricing, but two columns for "storage space" even though most of the instance types have these blank.
- There's nothing that says you can add columns to this page. You eventually figure out it's the gear icon.
- Then you click the gear on the top right to look at column names. You try searching the 44 column names for "price" or "cost" but both of those turn up blank, because there's no fuzzy searching.
- So rather than use the search box, you manually scroll through all 44 column names and find pricing at the bottom of the list.
This is the definition of out of the way. It's hard to imagine why you would default to showing two different storage columns over the pricing column, when half the instances are blank on storage.
Now do FSx, which has no pricing information at all, or any links to pricing information. They have an info tab telling you your backups are incremental, which would make you think they are fairly inexpensive. Not more expensive than the filesystem itself!
So they just added a default table widget, and they didn't even bother with customizing it. You can enable the context menu for the table's rows, which works and is empty.
I worked at AWS around 6 years ago, and we had a great win with just getting access to a service that provided the full list of available instance types and base prices.
This kind of disjointness is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that individual services stay within reasonable complexity, and usually all the functionality is available through the public APIs because the UI console is just another consumer of these APIs. AWS is also very careful with permissions, internal services try to avoid escalating privileges and try to perform everything using the user-visible access policies.
But it's bad because integration just sucks, and the UI layer is the ultimate example of this. AWS console _is_ really messy.
>AWS is not built around hobbyist needs
Yes, as if no startup teams are tasked to remain within hard spending targets when they're trying to build a POC with technologies that they are not initially experts in.
The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most. If I’m learning AWS and just added my CC to it, I am the last person to be qualified to setup this kind of an alert and policy from scratch. This needs to be a single text input in the billing page, like it is for countless spend-as-you-go services. When the limit is hit, the service needs to stop the usage at the customers peril, because that’s what they customer requests.
Hope this helps.
We set this up at my last job like in 10 minutes. Complexity is a matter of perspective, and if your job to do this, you have done this many-many times, and you have ready to use infrastructure as code templates.
Yes, AWS is massive, the documentation is huge and makes things inherently complex, but flexible too. You can define what behavior do you want when you exceed your limits. We can argue whether this is obfuscation or complexity or what, but based on my experience AWS optimizes it's product for enterprise-ish companies, that can afford to have SREs who knows exactly what to do in such cases. That is where they have their own training/certification program. For simple use cases there is AWS Lightsail where pricing is simple and easy to understand.
But even if it would be insanely complicated, that is a reason to downvote? HN used to be better than this kind of "I don't like your comment, let's downvote it".
I think about the diversity in usage patterns: from generating giant video stream broadcast somebody trying to calculate yet another digit of pi. It’s wild.
Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before). Too many variable.
If only there were some kind of software with a text based, natural language interface that we could ask a question like “how much would it cost to do XYNZ on AWS?”
Yes, as long as you do not have seasonal traffic, auto-scaling, spot instances, burstable instances, saving plans, reserved instances, floor/custom pricing, etc. These are tools to optimize your spendings and spend less if you know what you are doing.
> defending deliberately obfuscated pricing
A bit contradictory that price simulators are fine, but then the pricing is deliberately obfuscated. Then which one?
AWS is almost never required and almost never the best option. It's the Cisco of options, it's often the default but for no good reason other than someone on the team probably knows enough about AWS to make it work.
Almost every startup I've worked at has leveraged AWS as their primary but when not they end up using AWS for something. And in every startup there's always contention with AWS spend and all of these startups invest significant time and, funny enough money (via cost savings products or consulting), to reduce their AWS bill. And yet, they never seem to try anything else. Doomed to the cyclical cost savings cycle. Amazon knows this and the UI/UX is designed to keep companies in this money burning loop.
Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].
[0] https://mashable.com/article/amazon-web-services-outage-may-...
I probably should have commented on the original article here, but I pulled all of my company's production infra out of that AZ back in 2019 because AWS dragged its feet for too long deploying 5th gen hardware there.
I assumed the racks were full or something. I still don't know if they ever did get newer hardware in that AZ—I just avoid it like the plague.
I had a light chuckle this week when I discovered the work I did out of sheer frustration saved us from a partial outage seven years later.
On Google cloud compute, the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine.
No thank you
I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.
They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.
I've been working with AWS for nearly 10 years. Many people I know, both small and large, just don't even use the console. If I need to figure out how much a project costs I use the AWS pricing calculator. Having an ec2 pricing on the pricing page is meaningless once you spend any meaningful amount of time in AWS. Once you add discounts and reserved instances, that number is going to be inaccurate anyways.
If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge.
> If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge
That's fine if you feel that way. The article and following discussion is clearly about the smaller audience, and I think you're underestimating how far up these little problems stack and scale. If a couple grand is a rounding error to you, that's great. Most businesses fall firmly in the place where that would be a problem.
I think there is a value add for large companies on AWS, but for smaller ones, I don't particularly feel like AWS is an F1 car, more like a self driving Tesla that locks you inside when it's on fire. And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting. AWS is being pushed on everyone.
The complexity of AWS is because a service like AWS is complex. Neither Azure or GCP has any less complexity. DigitalOcean offers way less services and as a result is way less complex.
>And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting
They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat. No company is going to have fidelity to serve a perfect product to every market. The frustration comes from the misplaced belief that a product should serve every kind of user in the market.
I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you?
I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.
It's a metaphor. Your clients telling you they need you to deploy on AWS are the kind of people I believe are telling you to buy an F1 car to daily drive to whole foods. You said it yourself: "AWS is being pushed on everyone".
>I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.
Naturally. However, 99% of, what I believe are illegitimate complaints of AWS (AWS has tons of legitimate complaints), are from people who were probably better served by a using a simple VPS provider than a cloud provider. A VPS provider is simpler, easier to understand wrt to pricing, and cheaper. Most of the complexity in AWS comes from the fact that AWS itself is a very complex tool targeted to large organizations and deployments where people aren't using EC2 instances, or are using 100s of them. The complaint that the UI doesn't have enough affordances when trying to create a single EC2 instance is kind of ridiculous when you consider it's a tool designed for people launching 100s of instances. Nobody is reasonably launching 100 instances through the dashboard. Furthermore, if vendor lock-in is a concern you have AWS is the wrong tool.
Likewise for IAM. People complain a lot about IAM. But AWS has thousand different user types, and a 1000 different services. I've written my fair share of permission systems with a fraction of the amount of permutations. They always become complex due to the combinatorial nature. GCP manages to somehow be even worse. But you wouldn't need to deal with something like IAM if you just stuck with a VPS.
For instance, I don't see any pricing information when setting up an FSx filesystem, even for the size you setup. And there's definitely nothing saying backups will cost you more than storage (even though they are incremental?)
I spent 5 years optimizing spendings on AWS at various companies. Yes, it does come with traps and footguns. On the other hand if you know what are you doing, there are plenty of tools to optimize your spendings with RIs, saving plans, auto-scaling, etc, and spend less than the list prices.
Based on my experience AWS for the companies that can afford to pay surprise bills out of pocket if something goes wrong.
I agree with him/her, just shared my more nuanced take, based on my experience coming from my past workplaces.