5 ms·

> 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 t

by 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.
      - sam0x17 6y ago
        If you're working with, say ML workloads, daily billing is laughably broad. Some workloads run for an hour or two, and cost a ton.
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    The couple of AWS acquaintances I asked about this said that this kind of feature doesn't exist because: - There's almost no demand for it from the majority of their customers. - Billing code is a big, scary, tangled mess and also happens to be the one area where you really can't afford to introduce bugs and make mistakes, so meaningful change is already exceptionally difficult.
  - balls187 6y ago
    > sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Amazon, in my experience, has issued organizations a one-time credit in cases of surprise bills. The bigger crux of the issue, is Amazon has democratized CapEx into OpEx, and it's too easy to be ignorant of the details of infrastructure planning, which is rolled into AWS pricing. Before AWS, IT teams had to plan for and estimate costs prior to procuring hardware. This is no longer needed with ondemand, programmatic infrastructure. Engineers, who (reductively) focus on solving business problems with code, aren't necessarily thinking about the costs of deploying their solutions, the way Ops and IT would be.
  - Shorel 6y ago
    I started using my new account yesterday. I already got a surprise, because in one place it says t2.micro and t3.micro instances are free for twelve months. But, if the instance runs Windows, or the zone is this or that, or something else I don't know, the only free tier instance is actually the t2.micro. And then there's the Unlimited option, and CPU credits, where if your CPU use goes over 25% for some time, it will either: Be throttled so slow as to be useless, or, not being free and you still have to pay for each hour of use. And that's just the beginning!
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Or if that’s all you need you could run Lightsail for simple billing....
      - Shorel 6y ago
        I don't need simple billing. Lightsail seems to "suggest" way more expensive options than what I am using right now. What I need is clear and upfront documentation about pricing, before the bill comes.
- 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.

by exhaze 6y ago

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.
    - sam0x17 6y ago
      If you're working with, say ML workloads, daily billing is laughably broad. Some workloads run for an hour or two, and cost a ton.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  The couple of AWS acquaintances I asked about this said that this kind of feature doesn't exist because: - There's almost no demand for it from the majority of their customers. - Billing code is a big, scary, tangled mess and also happens to be the one area where you really can't afford to introduce bugs and make mistakes, so meaningful change is already exceptionally difficult.
- balls187 6y ago
  > sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Amazon, in my experience, has issued organizations a one-time credit in cases of surprise bills. The bigger crux of the issue, is Amazon has democratized CapEx into OpEx, and it's too easy to be ignorant of the details of infrastructure planning, which is rolled into AWS pricing. Before AWS, IT teams had to plan for and estimate costs prior to procuring hardware. This is no longer needed with ondemand, programmatic infrastructure. Engineers, who (reductively) focus on solving business problems with code, aren't necessarily thinking about the costs of deploying their solutions, the way Ops and IT would be.
- Shorel 6y ago
  I started using my new account yesterday. I already got a surprise, because in one place it says t2.micro and t3.micro instances are free for twelve months. But, if the instance runs Windows, or the zone is this or that, or something else I don't know, the only free tier instance is actually the t2.micro. And then there's the Unlimited option, and CPU credits, where if your CPU use goes over 25% for some time, it will either: Be throttled so slow as to be useless, or, not being free and you still have to pay for each hour of use. And that's just the beginning!
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Or if that’s all you need you could run Lightsail for simple billing....
    - Shorel 6y ago
      I don't need simple billing. Lightsail seems to "suggest" way more expensive options than what I am using right now. What I need is clear and upfront documentation about pricing, before the bill comes.
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.