13 ms·

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them

by davedx 6y ago

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

exhaze 6y ago
Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user with information with enough clarity to allow him to form accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs, and what is the implication in cost of applying some change. Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. The only reliable info on cost it the invoice you receive at the end of the month. Even then, the AWS guys felt the need to develop a full blown machine learning service to help customers predict what their next invoice will be.
  - exhaze 6y ago
    > Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. Did you actually look at the billing page? Here's a screenshot of my billing page: https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY It meticulously breaks out per-service costs across whatever dimension you want. "EC2-Other" is rolled up in the chart, but it's broken out by each individual item further down in the list.
    - coder543 6y ago
      Isn’t that exactly what the person you replied to said? You’re showing what you’ve been charged for previously. That part works, at a certain level of detail. That doesn’t show what you are being charged for right now, nor does it help you predict what your total costs will be at the end of the month.
      - exhaze 6y ago
        You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily breakdown of your costs.
        coder543 6y ago
        > You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS. > Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said. If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console. It’s been several years since I’ve had to be digging around in the billing console, so I have no stake in this discussion and things might have changed. Based on other comments being made around here, I really doubt anything significant has changed. I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood.
- mherrmann 6y ago
  > There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. It could be there are such tools. But they are impossible to find, setup or understand for someone who is not already an AWS expert. I recently got a $500 bill from AWS. It was impossible for me to find out which S3 buckets (or even specific files) caused these costs. I looked at this for half an hour and have used AWS before. They just don't tell you how to obtain this information. Or maybe they do, and it is so well hidden that it might as well not exist. This was a horrible user experience. As a customer, I want to know what I'm being charged for. The fact that AWS make it so difficult make me never want to use them again.
  - exhaze 6y ago
    It's literally called "Billing" and the "Cost Explorer" is the first item in the navigation when you go to the page. I've attached a screenshot and highlighted it for you. FYI, this month is the first time I've opened the AWS GUI in 4-5 months, and it took me about a minute to find the billing page and drill into our AWS costs. I've provided an image that shows how to get to the cost explorer from "Billing" (you can use the search box available on the AWS account landing page to type in "Billing" in order to access the billing page of AWS). EDIT: sorry, I forgot to include the screenshot link - https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr
    - mherrmann 6y ago
      This does not show the costs per bucket. Specifically, I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain this information.
      - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
        If this is an ongoing issue and you can’t get the information from something that is in front of S3 (cloudfront/your application etc) then you can enable bucket logging in the settings (which costs!)
- davedx 6y ago
  > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. Yes, I use it extensively. > Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses. It's not bad per se. The real problem I often see is that many people within the typical org aren't aware of how these costs can accumulate, especially when you have multiple DTAP environments, microservices, and so on. Another problem is the days of "put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes" seem to have been overtaken by the cloud native, microservices, k8s trends of the last few years. Personally I 100% agree this is the way to go for many (if not most) people -- and for this purpose Digital Ocean is just as good -- but what I see more often is people diving straight into the deep end, because "Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad?" I also think even big businesses underestimate the total costs of these all-in cloud infrastructures. You indeed need to pay people to keep track of this stuff -- multiple people. Your cloud costs + your devops/platform personnel costs can get to be a significant % of your total IT costs. Is it really necessary? Just because your business has a big market cap or significant revenue from digital doesn't necessarily mean it needs any of that stuff. Chances are you can run it all on the same couple of EC2 boxes you ran it on when you were still a small company.
  - exhaze 6y ago
    I think we are probably 90% in agreement on things, just talking about it in different terms. I think AWS/GCP have both gotten overwhelming in terms of how many different services they provide. Many people fall for it and end up playing AWS service golf (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668). Maybe a good analogy is to think of AWS as C. It's flexible and powerful, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. That would explain why a lot of these "> magical-tool deploy" services have emerged, promising to abstract away AWS.
- sixothree 6y ago
  They are awful. I have tried and tried to list the cost by resource (like you can in Azure) and I just can't figure it out. I think I might need to enable some special pricing tools (coincidentally not free) that Cost Explorer don't expose.
- wolco 6y ago
  From where I stand as someone who isn't using Amazon figuring out what my costs will be is difficult, impossible and would require wasting money on various tests. With something like digitalocean my costs are fixed. I might have misjudged how much I need but can scale up easily or down (with effort). Will Amazon offer fixed pricing? Does Amazom offer fixed pricing?
  - anaganisk 6y ago
    Aws is definitely not for hobbyists, or small applications, its a replacement to a datacenter with a lot of variables, not a VM. Your better comparison would be DigitalOcean vs Lightsail (AWS). So yes.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Yes. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
- Spooky23 6y ago
  AWS (or GCP or Azure or ...) value proposition depends on you. For a small/startup, the ability to execute quickly without sinking capital into a product that will likely pivot anyway is a superpower. When you get bigger, stuff gets dicey. Paying a premium for a "X as a Service" made sense when you had no people, but at some point the cost structure may not make sense or your needs are at odds with how the service delivery works. When you work for a big company or government agency, things change again -- you don't hire a database guy for a project, you have a project team that builds stuff, and an ops team that exerts the minimum viable effort to keep your stuff running or an outsourced ops team that does the same, but worse. At that point, you start looking at how much it costs to pay AWS to provide and SLA vs hiring more competent (ie. more $$$) ops people to keep it running. The long and short of it is that AWS is in a position to rake in cash up and down the spectrum -- all they need to do is be competent, which they are very good at.
- rudolph9 6y ago
  They’re literally entire companies of 100+ employees selling a product that helps you figure out how much money you’re spending on AWS https://www.cloudability.com/ https://www.cloudability.com/
smitty1e 6y ago
For those not in "the biz", the idea of a WordPress site isn't too far-fetched. One can mention that there is a LAMP stack behind WordPress without knocking too many unconscious. Amazon's genius has been to sell the various permutations of the acronym "LAMP" as services.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Yup; if you go with AWS, expect to build a pretty complicated setup distributed over many services. Even the basic LAMP / Wordpress stack mentioned in a sibling comment and often used in tutorials starts at $50 / month once you add everything up, and that's without any traffic. Although I guess Lightsail would be a lot more affordable.
- scarface74 6y ago
  $5 a month. https://codethump.com/tutorials/aws-wordpress-cost-price-hosting-lightsail/ https://codethump.com/tutorials/aws-wordpress-cost-price-hos...
gonzo41 6y ago
You're totally right. I look at the whole stack and aside from IAM and EC2, and ECS I think you could get by without a lot of those products.
- SubuSS 6y ago
  Problem is they are all built up of many smaller pieces as well - you may need the information about them at different points. For ex. EC2 drives are from EBS. if you need a load balancer ELB. You probably use S3 for some or other reason (log exports etc at least). You want a db - RDS makes it easier. Dynamo is literally a button click away. Kubernetes? Well there is EKS. Yes you can probably launch your own cache fleet using a bunch of ec2 boxes - but you don't get all the low level hooks Elasticache gets. You don't get the pricing discounts either (I remember cross zone replication or something being distinctly free for ec2 but you pay for network. Same with dynamo - access from all zones cost the same pretty much IIRC). If you are going to make the dive, it is worth spending the time. I would do a small overview bootcamp somewhere so that you know what's available and then start digging in for each new service you take up.
StreamBright 6y ago
I am not sure what you are talking about. We have many millions of yearly AWS cost and it is both predictable and understandable down to the last cent. One additional thing, I am not sure it occurred to you but some infrastructures operate on AWS are not sending any significant traffic outwards. S3 is used as a cheap and reliable data warehouse storage layer for exabytes of data just fine.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  Came here to say exactly this. There's a level of complexity and nuance in AWS that casual users or those on the outside do not quite comprehend. And honestly it takes quite of bit of experience and interaction to fully understand some of these things. It's not that you're getting charged "twice" for S3, it's that there are separately line items in the CUR for S3 data transfer, S3 storage (and S3 API, S3 inventory, etc.). It's confusing to a layperson but this level of detail is actually quite powerful. You can tune your application to use just what's needed.
notyourwork 6y ago
When every company workload and footprint is entirely different what alternative do you propose? Different companies have different needs and different cloud services suffice those needs in really different ways. You can run your database on relational, non-relational or flat text file backends. They all have different performances characteristics and different costs associated with running them.
- chickenpotpie 6y ago
  Not to mention that if AWS doesn’t price everything correctly someone will find out how to abuse it. For example, if AWS only charged for outbound bandwidth on S3 I could store petabytes of archives for almost free. If they only charged for storage, I would host all my high access, small size files on there for free. S3 is an oversimplification but it applies to other services. If they don’t charge for every way they can lose money on a service, someone will find it out and abuse it.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging. The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.
- doorstar 6y ago
  I've been horrified at how bad this is on Azure, I'm sorry to hear that AWS has the same issue. I've signed in some mornings only to discover that I've been charged $20 for a MongoDB instance that's been sitting idle all night. Support can only come back with some hand-waving about RUs, a term that defies any clear definition.
  - zaidf 6y ago
    This is a problem across enterprise SaaS companies. At my last company (small enterprise SaaS biz <$50M ARR), I got so tired of this consuming so much of my time. I literally hacked together some code so I could point at any line item from any bill generated by our "system" and it would try to answer "why did I get billed $x for this?" so a five year old could understand. I wish there were SaaS products that would effortlessly audit enterprise SaaS bills with support for more than just the top 1% SaaS products.
    - doorstar 6y ago
      I was poking around with their CLI to see if I could put together a cron job - this artifact now costs more than $X so delete it. Unfortunately if there's a 'get current charges' command I haven't found it. I have a ticket open with MS support. I suppose it's to their credit that they're listening to me but it's been a few weeks with only the aforementioned hand-waving. I started just sending them screenshots showing that their own dashboard showed no usage during the times I'd gotten charged.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Dealing with Azure causes me physical pain. AWS you can poke around and figure it out, Azure is a Kafkaesque nightmare of infinitely confusing UI/UX, a permission system that is like trying to hit a moving target in a dark room, being moved by someone that hates you, doing anything seems needlessly complex, and trying to replicate/test anything locally is horrible (looking at you Azure functions).
wilburlikesmith 6y ago
Brilliantly well put. May I screenshot this to 9gag?
- davedx 6y ago
  Sure
kavehkhorram 6y ago
Hey guys, I faced a similar issue at the company I work for (where a PM had activated an instance for months and racked up a $9k bill). I've been spending my coronavirus time hacking together a service that hopefully makes billing on AWS more clear. It does cost optimization and anomaly detection right now, and I plan on adding more features as I start to see more use cases. Check it out if you'd like, and let me know what you think! www.usage.ai

by davedx 6y ago

exhaze 6y ago

Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses.

rumanator 6y ago
> Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user with information with enough clarity to allow him to form accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs, and what is the implication in cost of applying some change. Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. The only reliable info on cost it the invoice you receive at the end of the month. Even then, the AWS guys felt the need to develop a full blown machine learning service to help customers predict what their next invoice will be.
- exhaze 6y ago
  > Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. Did you actually look at the billing page? Here's a screenshot of my billing page: https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY It meticulously breaks out per-service costs across whatever dimension you want. "EC2-Other" is rolled up in the chart, but it's broken out by each individual item further down in the list.
  - coder543 6y ago
    Isn’t that exactly what the person you replied to said? You’re showing what you’ve been charged for previously. That part works, at a certain level of detail. That doesn’t show what you are being charged for right now, nor does it help you predict what your total costs will be at the end of the month.
    - exhaze 6y ago
      You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily breakdown of your costs.
      - coder543 6y ago
        > You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS. > Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said. If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console. It’s been several years since I’ve had to be digging around in the billing console, so I have no stake in this discussion and things might have changed. Based on other comments being made around here, I really doubt anything significant has changed. I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood.
mherrmann 6y ago
> There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. It could be there are such tools. But they are impossible to find, setup or understand for someone who is not already an AWS expert. I recently got a $500 bill from AWS. It was impossible for me to find out which S3 buckets (or even specific files) caused these costs. I looked at this for half an hour and have used AWS before. They just don't tell you how to obtain this information. Or maybe they do, and it is so well hidden that it might as well not exist. This was a horrible user experience. As a customer, I want to know what I'm being charged for. The fact that AWS make it so difficult make me never want to use them again.
- exhaze 6y ago
  It's literally called "Billing" and the "Cost Explorer" is the first item in the navigation when you go to the page. I've attached a screenshot and highlighted it for you. FYI, this month is the first time I've opened the AWS GUI in 4-5 months, and it took me about a minute to find the billing page and drill into our AWS costs. I've provided an image that shows how to get to the cost explorer from "Billing" (you can use the search box available on the AWS account landing page to type in "Billing" in order to access the billing page of AWS). EDIT: sorry, I forgot to include the screenshot link - https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr
  - mherrmann 6y ago
    This does not show the costs per bucket. Specifically, I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain this information.
    - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
      If this is an ongoing issue and you can’t get the information from something that is in front of S3 (cloudfront/your application etc) then you can enable bucket logging in the settings (which costs!)
davedx 6y ago
> Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. Yes, I use it extensively. > Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses. It's not bad per se. The real problem I often see is that many people within the typical org aren't aware of how these costs can accumulate, especially when you have multiple DTAP environments, microservices, and so on. Another problem is the days of "put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes" seem to have been overtaken by the cloud native, microservices, k8s trends of the last few years. Personally I 100% agree this is the way to go for many (if not most) people -- and for this purpose Digital Ocean is just as good -- but what I see more often is people diving straight into the deep end, because "Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad?" I also think even big businesses underestimate the total costs of these all-in cloud infrastructures. You indeed need to pay people to keep track of this stuff -- multiple people. Your cloud costs + your devops/platform personnel costs can get to be a significant % of your total IT costs. Is it really necessary? Just because your business has a big market cap or significant revenue from digital doesn't necessarily mean it needs any of that stuff. Chances are you can run it all on the same couple of EC2 boxes you ran it on when you were still a small company.
- exhaze 6y ago
  I think we are probably 90% in agreement on things, just talking about it in different terms. I think AWS/GCP have both gotten overwhelming in terms of how many different services they provide. Many people fall for it and end up playing AWS service golf (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668). Maybe a good analogy is to think of AWS as C. It's flexible and powerful, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. That would explain why a lot of these "> magical-tool deploy" services have emerged, promising to abstract away AWS.
sixothree 6y ago
They are awful. I have tried and tried to list the cost by resource (like you can in Azure) and I just can't figure it out. I think I might need to enable some special pricing tools (coincidentally not free) that Cost Explorer don't expose.
wolco 6y ago
From where I stand as someone who isn't using Amazon figuring out what my costs will be is difficult, impossible and would require wasting money on various tests. With something like digitalocean my costs are fixed. I might have misjudged how much I need but can scale up easily or down (with effort). Will Amazon offer fixed pricing? Does Amazom offer fixed pricing?
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Aws is definitely not for hobbyists, or small applications, its a replacement to a datacenter with a lot of variables, not a VM. Your better comparison would be DigitalOcean vs Lightsail (AWS). So yes.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Yes. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
Spooky23 6y ago
AWS (or GCP or Azure or ...) value proposition depends on you. For a small/startup, the ability to execute quickly without sinking capital into a product that will likely pivot anyway is a superpower. When you get bigger, stuff gets dicey. Paying a premium for a "X as a Service" made sense when you had no people, but at some point the cost structure may not make sense or your needs are at odds with how the service delivery works. When you work for a big company or government agency, things change again -- you don't hire a database guy for a project, you have a project team that builds stuff, and an ops team that exerts the minimum viable effort to keep your stuff running or an outsourced ops team that does the same, but worse. At that point, you start looking at how much it costs to pay AWS to provide and SLA vs hiring more competent (ie. more $$$) ops people to keep it running. The long and short of it is that AWS is in a position to rake in cash up and down the spectrum -- all they need to do is be competent, which they are very good at.
rudolph9 6y ago
They’re literally entire companies of 100+ employees selling a product that helps you figure out how much money you’re spending on AWS https://www.cloudability.com/ https://www.cloudability.com/

smitty1e 6y ago

For those not in "the biz", the idea of a WordPress site isn't too far-fetched. One can mention that there is a LAMP stack behind WordPress without knocking too many unconscious. Amazon's genius has been to sell the various permutations of the acronym "LAMP" as services.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Yup; if you go with AWS, expect to build a pretty complicated setup distributed over many services. Even the basic LAMP / Wordpress stack mentioned in a sibling comment and often used in tutorials starts at $50 / month once you add everything up, and that's without any traffic. Although I guess Lightsail would be a lot more affordable.

scarface74 6y ago
$5 a month. https://codethump.com/tutorials/aws-wordpress-cost-price-hosting-lightsail/ https://codethump.com/tutorials/aws-wordpress-cost-price-hos...

gonzo41 6y ago

You're totally right. I look at the whole stack and aside from IAM and EC2, and ECS I think you could get by without a lot of those products.

SubuSS 6y ago
Problem is they are all built up of many smaller pieces as well - you may need the information about them at different points. For ex. EC2 drives are from EBS. if you need a load balancer ELB. You probably use S3 for some or other reason (log exports etc at least). You want a db - RDS makes it easier. Dynamo is literally a button click away. Kubernetes? Well there is EKS. Yes you can probably launch your own cache fleet using a bunch of ec2 boxes - but you don't get all the low level hooks Elasticache gets. You don't get the pricing discounts either (I remember cross zone replication or something being distinctly free for ec2 but you pay for network. Same with dynamo - access from all zones cost the same pretty much IIRC). If you are going to make the dive, it is worth spending the time. I would do a small overview bootcamp somewhere so that you know what's available and then start digging in for each new service you take up.

StreamBright 6y ago

I am not sure what you are talking about. We have many millions of yearly AWS cost and it is both predictable and understandable down to the last cent. One additional thing, I am not sure it occurred to you but some infrastructures operate on AWS are not sending any significant traffic outwards. S3 is used as a cheap and reliable data warehouse storage layer for exabytes of data just fine.

brodouevencode 6y ago
Came here to say exactly this. There's a level of complexity and nuance in AWS that casual users or those on the outside do not quite comprehend. And honestly it takes quite of bit of experience and interaction to fully understand some of these things. It's not that you're getting charged "twice" for S3, it's that there are separately line items in the CUR for S3 data transfer, S3 storage (and S3 API, S3 inventory, etc.). It's confusing to a layperson but this level of detail is actually quite powerful. You can tune your application to use just what's needed.

notyourwork 6y ago

When every company workload and footprint is entirely different what alternative do you propose? Different companies have different needs and different cloud services suffice those needs in really different ways. You can run your database on relational, non-relational or flat text file backends. They all have different performances characteristics and different costs associated with running them.

chickenpotpie 6y ago
Not to mention that if AWS doesn’t price everything correctly someone will find out how to abuse it. For example, if AWS only charged for outbound bandwidth on S3 I could store petabytes of archives for almost free. If they only charged for storage, I would host all my high access, small size files on there for free. S3 is an oversimplification but it applies to other services. If they don’t charge for every way they can lose money on a service, someone will find it out and abuse it.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging. The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

doorstar 6y ago
I've been horrified at how bad this is on Azure, I'm sorry to hear that AWS has the same issue. I've signed in some mornings only to discover that I've been charged $20 for a MongoDB instance that's been sitting idle all night. Support can only come back with some hand-waving about RUs, a term that defies any clear definition.
- zaidf 6y ago
  This is a problem across enterprise SaaS companies. At my last company (small enterprise SaaS biz <$50M ARR), I got so tired of this consuming so much of my time. I literally hacked together some code so I could point at any line item from any bill generated by our "system" and it would try to answer "why did I get billed $x for this?" so a five year old could understand. I wish there were SaaS products that would effortlessly audit enterprise SaaS bills with support for more than just the top 1% SaaS products.
  - doorstar 6y ago
    I was poking around with their CLI to see if I could put together a cron job - this artifact now costs more than $X so delete it. Unfortunately if there's a 'get current charges' command I haven't found it. I have a ticket open with MS support. I suppose it's to their credit that they're listening to me but it's been a few weeks with only the aforementioned hand-waving. I started just sending them screenshots showing that their own dashboard showed no usage during the times I'd gotten charged.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  Dealing with Azure causes me physical pain. AWS you can poke around and figure it out, Azure is a Kafkaesque nightmare of infinitely confusing UI/UX, a permission system that is like trying to hit a moving target in a dark room, being moved by someone that hates you, doing anything seems needlessly complex, and trying to replicate/test anything locally is horrible (looking at you Azure functions).

wilburlikesmith 6y ago

Brilliantly well put. May I screenshot this to 9gag?

davedx 6y ago
Sure

kavehkhorram 6y ago

Hey guys, I faced a similar issue at the company I work for (where a PM had activated an instance for months and racked up a $9k bill). I've been spending my coronavirus time hacking together a service that hopefully makes billing on AWS more clear. It does cost optimization and anomaly detection right now, and I plan on adding more features as I start to see more use cases. Check it out if you'd like, and let me know what you think! www.usage.ai