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?