11 ms·

A lot of the complexity parent describes in billing is Amazon's own fault for their user-hostile "reserved instances" feature. If Amazon canned reserved instanc

A 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 ago
Google offer reserved instances too. They're called committed use discounts
- user5994461 9y ago
  They 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 ago
    Half 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 ago
      Google 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
        Did you even read what I wrote? They offer neither single/dedicated placement, capacity reservation (nor for that matter arch-specific capacity reservation). Meanwhile thanks for those links - I didn't realize Google, despite having such a youthful billing system already has the mess that is Instance Size Flexibility, they just call it "inferred instance sizes" instead, nor did I realize their discounting scheme is in fact _more complex_ - committed use discounts are mutually exclusive to sustained use discounts. That's even harder to model upfront than AWS' offering!
        TheIronYuppie 9y ago
        Disclosure: I work at Google on Google Cloud What kind of hardware architecture do you want? You can reserve CPU type easily (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms), including if you need it to be "Anything newer than <x>". Also, sustained use discounts AUTOMATICALLY discount you (including binpacking a bunch of machine, so let's say you ran 4 machines for 7 days at the beginning of the month, you'd get the discount of running 1 machine for 28 days).

_wmd 9y ago

Google offer reserved instances too. They're called committed use discounts

user5994461 9y ago
They 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 ago
  Half 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 ago
    Google 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
      Did you even read what I wrote? They offer neither single/dedicated placement, capacity reservation (nor for that matter arch-specific capacity reservation). Meanwhile thanks for those links - I didn't realize Google, despite having such a youthful billing system already has the mess that is Instance Size Flexibility, they just call it "inferred instance sizes" instead, nor did I realize their discounting scheme is in fact _more complex_ - committed use discounts are mutually exclusive to sustained use discounts. That's even harder to model upfront than AWS' offering!
      - TheIronYuppie 9y ago
        Disclosure: I work at Google on Google Cloud What kind of hardware architecture do you want? You can reserve CPU type easily (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms), including if you need it to be "Anything newer than <x>". Also, sustained use discounts AUTOMATICALLY discount you (including binpacking a bunch of machine, so let's say you ran 4 machines for 7 days at the beginning of the month, you'd get the discount of running 1 machine for 28 days).