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It would be great if they also included a pricing calculator/model for all those AWS things tied up together. If cloud providers want to be seen like utility p

It would be great if they also included a pricing calculator/model for all those AWS things tied up together. If cloud providers want to be seen like utility providers, they need to provide a simple pricing model analogous to Watt and kWh in electricity for users to be able to estimate costs easily.

kuschku 9y ago
That’d go directly against their business interests. It’s in Amazon’s interest to make it as confusing as possible, so you never notice you spend orders of magnitudes more than you’d have to.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  I really don't think it's in Amazon's interests to have a "holy shit, what happened?" reaction when you open your credit card bill.
  - actionscripted 9y ago
    And if you do -- say you forgot to kill some mega-cluster you were experimenting with and it ran for a few days before you terminated it -- they'll usually just drop the charge.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  I've been using most of these services since they launched and I can say that as a whole they are significantly cheaper to both run and develop until you get to very large scale at which point the code transfers to real servers pretty easily. I have several mobile apps that I run literaly free because the Lambda usage is under the free tier and those I don't cost dollars a month. I am very happy with it in general. There is of course the problem with any instant scaling metered service that if you are actively attacked you can rack up a large bill but there are monitoring systems that can be used to prevent that if you want (at the cost of taking down the service) or allow it to scale (at the cost of $$ but your customers stay happy). Edit: It is worth noting (based on discussion below) that other posters are right. It is not for everyone. It has some major tradeoffs that you need to be aware of and plan around. But if the tradeoffs are OK (and I personally found they are for many of my projects) it is a great service.
  - polskibus 9y ago
    I'm curious, what do those apps do? Surely they need a database behind the severless layer? If so, is the database also on some kind of free tier? I'm mostly interested in TCO kind of calculators for cloud computing, not calculators on a per service-type basis.
    - joecot 9y ago
      DynamoDB, which is Amazon's serverless NoSQL database offering. If your service takes off, it's also the guaranteed source of a serious amount of cash for the company. If you get big while on DynamoDB, 1) it's near impossible to restructure to optimize your tables, 2) it's near impossible to migrate off of without serious pain, 3) your only method of controlling performance is sliding read/write throughput meters for your tables (ie, paying them more money). DynamoDB is not a service I'd be comfortable locking into. Use DynamoDB if you are absolutely sure your database structure is perfectly optimized from the get go for the traffic you're going to receive. Your indexes and structure have to be absolutely perfect starting, because there's no good way to fix them later.
      - throwaway2016a 9y ago
        I value your opinion but I have had a very different experience. 1. I agree. First few attempts at DynamoDB tables were a disaster. But once you get used to them you don't have to change schemas and then it is not an issue. Note, you can add and indexes, just not the primary one. 2. Not so. It's not easy but it's far from impossible or painful. I've had my fair share of pain migrating SQL databases too. ... Export to S3 ... Grab the S3 backup and write an ETL to format and load it ... Put in place a stream hook to keep your newly loaded database up to date ... Switch over your data abstraction / model layer (you did use one of those right?) 3. You can also choose your indexes wisely. How is this different than a normal database? Most of my DynamoDB using apps I run for 100% free and I've scaled to hundreds of thousands of users for less than the cost of a small Postgres server. Just keep a model layer between you and Dynamo to avoid vendor lockin and you'll be fine.
    - throwaway2016a 9y ago
- querulous 9y ago
  in my experience aws are incredibly proactive about helping customers understand their costs and offering suggestions to save money. they regularly send me cost benefit analysis of using reserved instances, for example
nolite 9y ago
Hi, I'm thinking about working on a solution to better understand and limit costs in AWS. Could I contact you to understand a bit more about what would be an ideal setup for you?
- polskibus 9y ago
  I'm not a big user myself. However, what I think is missing is a tool where you map your data flows, choose the flow steps as Amazon services, get required parameters back, fill them in, get back estimated cost.

kuschku 9y ago

That’d go directly against their business interests. It’s in Amazon’s interest to make it as confusing as possible, so you never notice you spend orders of magnitudes more than you’d have to.

ceejayoz 9y ago
I really don't think it's in Amazon's interests to have a "holy shit, what happened?" reaction when you open your credit card bill.
- actionscripted 9y ago
  And if you do -- say you forgot to kill some mega-cluster you were experimenting with and it ran for a few days before you terminated it -- they'll usually just drop the charge.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
I've been using most of these services since they launched and I can say that as a whole they are significantly cheaper to both run and develop until you get to very large scale at which point the code transfers to real servers pretty easily. I have several mobile apps that I run literaly free because the Lambda usage is under the free tier and those I don't cost dollars a month. I am very happy with it in general. There is of course the problem with any instant scaling metered service that if you are actively attacked you can rack up a large bill but there are monitoring systems that can be used to prevent that if you want (at the cost of taking down the service) or allow it to scale (at the cost of $$ but your customers stay happy). Edit: It is worth noting (based on discussion below) that other posters are right. It is not for everyone. It has some major tradeoffs that you need to be aware of and plan around. But if the tradeoffs are OK (and I personally found they are for many of my projects) it is a great service.
- polskibus 9y ago
  I'm curious, what do those apps do? Surely they need a database behind the severless layer? If so, is the database also on some kind of free tier? I'm mostly interested in TCO kind of calculators for cloud computing, not calculators on a per service-type basis.
  - joecot 9y ago
    DynamoDB, which is Amazon's serverless NoSQL database offering. If your service takes off, it's also the guaranteed source of a serious amount of cash for the company. If you get big while on DynamoDB, 1) it's near impossible to restructure to optimize your tables, 2) it's near impossible to migrate off of without serious pain, 3) your only method of controlling performance is sliding read/write throughput meters for your tables (ie, paying them more money). DynamoDB is not a service I'd be comfortable locking into. Use DynamoDB if you are absolutely sure your database structure is perfectly optimized from the get go for the traffic you're going to receive. Your indexes and structure have to be absolutely perfect starting, because there's no good way to fix them later.
    - throwaway2016a 9y ago
      I value your opinion but I have had a very different experience. 1. I agree. First few attempts at DynamoDB tables were a disaster. But once you get used to them you don't have to change schemas and then it is not an issue. Note, you can add and indexes, just not the primary one. 2. Not so. It's not easy but it's far from impossible or painful. I've had my fair share of pain migrating SQL databases too. ... Export to S3 ... Grab the S3 backup and write an ETL to format and load it ... Put in place a stream hook to keep your newly loaded database up to date ... Switch over your data abstraction / model layer (you did use one of those right?) 3. You can also choose your indexes wisely. How is this different than a normal database? Most of my DynamoDB using apps I run for 100% free and I've scaled to hundreds of thousands of users for less than the cost of a small Postgres server. Just keep a model layer between you and Dynamo to avoid vendor lockin and you'll be fine.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
querulous 9y ago
in my experience aws are incredibly proactive about helping customers understand their costs and offering suggestions to save money. they regularly send me cost benefit analysis of using reserved instances, for example

nolite 9y ago

Hi, I'm thinking about working on a solution to better understand and limit costs in AWS. Could I contact you to understand a bit more about what would be an ideal setup for you?

polskibus 9y ago
I'm not a big user myself. However, what I think is missing is a tool where you map your data flows, choose the flow steps as Amazon services, get required parameters back, fill them in, get back estimated cost.