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> 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 use

> 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.
      - exhaze 6y ago
        > 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. No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough. > Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said. OK, what are you trying to say? If my response above did not answer the question, can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?
        coder543 6y ago
        > can you give me a one sentence summary of the point? >> I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood. Alternatively, “The billing UI and billing infrastructure is a major weakness of AWS when it comes to helping people understand what their usage will cost.” You can clearly see this is true by the large number of people who complain about it.
        6y ago
  - fragsworth 6y ago
    I'm not sure why that would be terribly important though? A month of delay in optimizing your services isn't going to make or break an average company.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - enitihas 6y ago
    You can opt in for detailed billing report, and get detailed daily reports on what you are being charged on. You can load it in any db of your choice and ask all the questions that you want.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    If you set up your infrastructure with CloudFormation (as you should), you can get a cost estimation of how much your solution would cost. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/using-cfn-paying.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      > CloudFormation (as you should) A lot of people use Terraform (my shop does) and I've found a good terraform setup way better than CF templates. You can do tags in Terraform too. You should be forced to use their already bad tooling just to get correct cost estimates.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Yet another reason to use native tooling. If you want to take advantage of AWS features - you have to use AWS features. Blame Hashicorp if they don’t have a similar feature.
        mixedCase 6y ago
        Moving from Terraform to CloudForm is as pleasant as chewing glass, and the last thing we need is more AWS lock-in unless you're running an AWS consultancy.
        scarface74 6y ago
        If you are using Terraform you are still “locked into” AWS since all of their provisioners are cloud specific. Also if you are at any type of scale, your IAAC choice is the least of your problems. Have you actually done a realistic project plan and estimated how much it would cost to migrate infrastructure from one provider to another once you reach any scale - including regression testing, auditing, training, etc? Do you really just use your cloud provider to host a bunch of VMs? Even then it’s not that easy at scale.
- nolok 6y ago
  You're absolutely right, and also absolutely missing his point. As a massive user of AWS for a long time, yes you can know exactly to the sub-detail line what you pay for, no you can absolutely not have an overview or good estimation of mapping what a change in your software stack / setup will cost or save you. Unless we're talking "remove an entire service" and then duh, yeah.
  - gowld 6y ago
    How is that different from if you ran all this stuff on prem?
    - nolok 6y ago
      First, the obvious that if a massive surge happens (attack, bug, ...) on prem stop serving, aws surprise-drain your bank account. Yes it's possible to have fail safe to avoid it, it's also very common to not have them or that they're not tested or working. Second, the "in-between" costslike bandwidth from service to service, iops on your disk, ... They mostly don't exist on prem, you either have enough of it and it works or you don't and it doesn't work and you need to go buy a bigger pipe. They're one of the biggest source of surprise cost on AWS. Eg take a basic data storing application, the cpu and storage space are easy to estimate and are the same as on prem, but suddenly you also need to estimate your iops, and you realize you have no idea about it. Do you have an on-prem database running somewhere ? How many iops does it need ? Unless you've had to figure it out, you have no idea and will never know on prem.
StreamBright 6y ago
If the AWS tools fail to provide you this information than you can just tag everything (we use scope, stage, service, region, owner tags, example: global, dev, hadoop, eu-west-1, data-engineering) and it is trivial to generate a cost report where you can drill down by environments, teams, services, etc.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Exactly, I’m often fielding questions over on r/aws about how to do X on AWS where X is something simple. I then ask are they trying to solve problem X or are they trying to learn AWS. If it is the former, just use LightSail. Outside of serverless applications, I wouldn’t want the complications of full fledge AWS for a small project and I get paid to know the ins and outs of it.

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.
    - exhaze 6y ago
      > 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. No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough. > Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said. OK, what are you trying to say? If my response above did not answer the question, can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?
      - coder543 6y ago
        > can you give me a one sentence summary of the point? >> I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood. Alternatively, “The billing UI and billing infrastructure is a major weakness of AWS when it comes to helping people understand what their usage will cost.” You can clearly see this is true by the large number of people who complain about it.
      - 6y ago
- fragsworth 6y ago
  I'm not sure why that would be terribly important though? A month of delay in optimizing your services isn't going to make or break an average company.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- enitihas 6y ago
  You can opt in for detailed billing report, and get detailed daily reports on what you are being charged on. You can load it in any db of your choice and ask all the questions that you want.
- scarface74 6y ago
  If you set up your infrastructure with CloudFormation (as you should), you can get a cost estimation of how much your solution would cost. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/using-cfn-paying.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    > CloudFormation (as you should) A lot of people use Terraform (my shop does) and I've found a good terraform setup way better than CF templates. You can do tags in Terraform too. You should be forced to use their already bad tooling just to get correct cost estimates.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Yet another reason to use native tooling. If you want to take advantage of AWS features - you have to use AWS features. Blame Hashicorp if they don’t have a similar feature.
      - mixedCase 6y ago
        Moving from Terraform to CloudForm is as pleasant as chewing glass, and the last thing we need is more AWS lock-in unless you're running an AWS consultancy.
        scarface74 6y ago
        If you are using Terraform you are still “locked into” AWS since all of their provisioners are cloud specific. Also if you are at any type of scale, your IAAC choice is the least of your problems. Have you actually done a realistic project plan and estimated how much it would cost to migrate infrastructure from one provider to another once you reach any scale - including regression testing, auditing, training, etc? Do you really just use your cloud provider to host a bunch of VMs? Even then it’s not that easy at scale.
nolok 6y ago
You're absolutely right, and also absolutely missing his point. As a massive user of AWS for a long time, yes you can know exactly to the sub-detail line what you pay for, no you can absolutely not have an overview or good estimation of mapping what a change in your software stack / setup will cost or save you. Unless we're talking "remove an entire service" and then duh, yeah.
- gowld 6y ago
  How is that different from if you ran all this stuff on prem?
  - nolok 6y ago
    First, the obvious that if a massive surge happens (attack, bug, ...) on prem stop serving, aws surprise-drain your bank account. Yes it's possible to have fail safe to avoid it, it's also very common to not have them or that they're not tested or working. Second, the "in-between" costslike bandwidth from service to service, iops on your disk, ... They mostly don't exist on prem, you either have enough of it and it works or you don't and it doesn't work and you need to go buy a bigger pipe. They're one of the biggest source of surprise cost on AWS. Eg take a basic data storing application, the cpu and storage space are easy to estimate and are the same as on prem, but suddenly you also need to estimate your iops, and you realize you have no idea about it. Do you have an on-prem database running somewhere ? How many iops does it need ? Unless you've had to figure it out, you have no idea and will never know on prem.

StreamBright 6y ago

If the AWS tools fail to provide you this information than you can just tag everything (we use scope, stage, service, region, owner tags, example: global, dev, hadoop, eu-west-1, data-engineering) and it is trivial to generate a cost report where you can drill down by environments, teams, services, etc.

scarface74 6y ago
Exactly, I’m often fielding questions over on r/aws about how to do X on AWS where X is something simple. I then ask are they trying to solve problem X or are they trying to learn AWS. If it is the former, just use LightSail. Outside of serverless applications, I wouldn’t want the complications of full fledge AWS for a small project and I get paid to know the ins and outs of it.