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In Amazon's defence their billing system is far more complex than Google's, not because Google have done some marvellous job on theirs, but because it is a soli
by _wmd 9y ago
In Amazon's defence their billing system is far more complex than Google's, not because Google have done some marvellous job on theirs, but because it is a solid decade younger and hasn't caught up with all the bells and whistles yet.
The price you pay for an instance not only depends on what you've already spent up to that moment in your account, and all accounts attached to the same organization, but also any reservations in those accounts which may /float/ into your account should they not be used in their home account, and crucially, _the price varies according to what you use, and every associated account uses, in the future_.
Finally at month end, your entire account receives a bulk tiering discount that cannot be calculated until your full usage is known.
If you have 1x t2.medium reservation and there is already a t2.medium machine running in the account, the price displayed would likely be the on-demand price. However, if after starting your new t2.medium you kill the old one, the price _applied_ will likely be the reserved price -- so long as both instances did not use more than 60 minutes runtime in that hour.
You can however, get a reasonable preview of your daily spend with 24 hours lag using Cost Explorer, which I think is more than resonable considering it is a meaningful, comprehensive account view, and not some tiny datum associated with a single item on your bill. For anyone spending serious money with either Amazon or Google, there should be a large upfront modelling step involved before stuff starts to get purchased, no per-item price preview can avoid that.
Meanwhile I wonder if Google's display price reflects sustained use discounts or committed use discounts. Given how underbaked most of Google Cloud is, I suspect (before ever having to look!) the answer to that is a resounding "no".
So the question becomes, would you prefer no information, or information that may be off by in excess of 70%?
- dantillberg 9y agoA lot of the complexity parent describes in billing is Amazon's own fault for their user-hostile "reserved instances" feature. If Amazon canned reserved instances and replaced it with automatic volume discounts, or just discounts, then they could well simplify billing quite a bit. But they made design mistakes by introducing reserved instances in the first place, they've dug in their heels on it with revisions, and they don't want to give up the fatter profit margins they get from this differentiated pricing. Parent attributes that to Amazon's age, which I agree has merit. But if Amazon has become inflexible and impenetrable with age, then we should up and leave for better platforms.
- _wmd 9y agoGoogle offer reserved instances too. They're called committed use discounts
- user5994461 9y agoThey are not comparable. On google you pick a continent and a number of CPU to reserve. On AWS, you have to pick 10 different parameters for the exact reservations you want and you better not miss it because you can't change. AWS billing model is not only antiquated but hostile to their users.
- _wmd 9y agoHalf of the parameters relate to features Google doesn't support yet - instance type - Google schedules you on whatever random CPU they have at hand unless you specify otherwise, with no ability to reserve capacity ahead of time, never mind tying it to a particular hardware architecture. - placement - Google does not offer single tenant or dedicated placement instances - scope - Google does not offer capacity-reserving discounts - convertibility - Google does not offer reservation of particular hardware types, so this option makes no sense But give it another a few more years, and let's see what their billing offering looks like then The one thing it looks like Google really did nail here, though, is decoupling bundled licensing from their discounts. With AWS when you buy a RHEL reserved instance, it's a RHEL reserved instance.
- user5994461 9y agoGoogle has everything. See sustained use and committed used discounts. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/sustained-use-discount... https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-use-discounts https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-c...
- _wmd 9y ago