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Former Amazon employee here. They're cross-charged with lots of internal book-keeping. The rates teams "pay" internally are different from public pricing of co
by ryanianian 8y ago
Former Amazon employee here.
They're cross-charged with lots of internal book-keeping. The rates teams "pay" internally are different from public pricing of course but expensive things externally are still expensive things internally. The cost-accounting used to be (3+ years ago) much more "just looking...no pressure to keep them down", but recently there's been huge efforts to bring internal AWS costs down, especially for EC2 usage. I heard rumors that much of the Prime Day fiasco this year could have been avoided if teams would have been permitted to spin up enough capacity.
- always_good 8y agoI'm reminded of a story my ex-Amazon friend would tell where it was a week-long process to get an extra $100-something stick of RAM for his workstation when he started there, needing various sign-off and escalations for such a grave expense. Meanwhile he was deploying some machine-learning categorization stuff he was working on to some cluster that would cost five figures of compute each time, and nobody batted an eye.
- ryanianian 8y agoThis is a pretty common thing within Amazon. Internally it's called being "Frupid" (frugal + stupid). It's one of the reasons I left. Also you have to jump through pretty extreme hoops if your hardware estimates (usually made at least 3 months out) were under-shot and now your service is redlining. This leads to teams way over-estimating their hardware needs and thus millions being spent on idle reserved EC2 capacity. So now they police (with savagery) idle capacity, so services or workloads that are "bursty" are basically an internal-bureaucracy nightmare. It's much nicer to use AWS outside of Amazon :)
- toomuchtodo 8y agoThanks, I really appreciate the insight.