Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console.
When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set it via AI into a cdk construct. Usually pick a relatively normal machine type digging through all the ilvarious enterprise discounts (which are not reflectedin the prices in the console). Then as I roll out or when I get resource limit alarms on the fleet I adjust the instance types. Or when accounting asks me about price. In those cases I usually look if it's worth it to optimize.
The enterprise discounts are a big consideration. Every year new hires make bad decisions because they don't know about the discounts. They wildly affect total cost. Some things are more expensive (lambda first few years), and others are very cheap so we dog food. The console price in no way reflects reality.
In 15 years we've had about 1k services stood up, around 700 are active. 2000 or total counting tutorials and tests. That means out of an eng org of 500, we've made those decisions maybe 10k times total.
That's how Amazon thinks about it as well. So yeah I agree that the UI isn't meant to be like one where your spinning up a host. I haven't spun up a single host in like 5 years, but I've made many clusters.
But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be better to work for a wider audience. Customer obsession and all
In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.
This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession.
That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon sucks overall, not just for pricing/packaging but even getting basic shit done. So perhaps Amazon (or at least AWS) doesn't think a good UX is a key ingredient to demonstrating Customer Obsession.
AWS services names are notoriously bad at communicating what they actually do: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
So no, they care zero about their customers, except maybe for getting as much money as possible out of it.
Ask me how I know
Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right?
So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no.
Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - configuring all that stuff on the UI, and getting it right is torture.
> the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.
So this is about the engineers consuming AWS, not the ones who designed and implemented AWS
It was absolutely hammered into me in the years of working for startups that followed, though.
I think that applies both to Amazon's dev system and pricing system. From what I hear about the insides, alignment is chaotic neutral inside of Amazon, but that shouldn't affect how we judge the system itself.
I think the problem is that nobody understands the size of the problem.
For most tasks, the accomplishment is getting something to work. That takes 90% of the time. But the UI requires polish, working things out, backing out and trying again, and takes the OTHER 90% of the time.
I remember talking to a friend who worked with apple to port some dvd authoring software. And steve jobs started with the UI, and said "this is what you do". I think it was just a blank screen and you drag your video onto it. the software they were porting was a bunch of windows type confusing nonsense, and they had big changes to make.
That said, AWS might be a dark pattern. Remember the cable companies that didn't WANT to show the hidden fees? because $29.99 a month was really $71.41?
When I started my latest project my first rule was: I never have to login to AWS console. I didn’t achieve ‘never’ but I am pretty close and the experience is a lot better