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AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that

• indemnity 5y ago
  Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource. Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard. Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.
  • minxomat 5y ago
    Enterprise Agreement accounts aren’t billed on demand, so there’s little use for that in accounts spending a lot of money.
  • katbyte 5y ago
    Azure groups most things into resource groups which greatly simplifies things.
  • rorykoehler 5y ago
    Yes. Also split out into sub categories. How much of an ec2 spend was on bandwidth and how much on compute for example.
• paaakthecaaa 5y ago
  They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actions would go a long ways towards demonstrating good faith in that area. If it would cost too much, maybe they could present it as an easy way to cut expenses at the same time that they introduce a small price increase. This is a common and long-standing complaint/feature request.
  • thedevelopnik 5y ago
    I’m not trying to be snarky here, would like an honest opinion: how do they win on UX? Are there specific things you like there? I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP. I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.
    • judge2020 5y ago
      It either works great or barely depending on the service you're using - some AWS teams have dedicated dashboard teams, eg 'ec2 dashboard team' which solely focus on the dashboard experience, while others touch it as an afterthought. I'm pretty sure something along the lines of this^ was posted on HN by a former AWS employee but I can't find it now.
    • XorNot 5y ago
      The AWS default view feels more crisp for me, compared to the GCP one which feels very "floaty". Their UI toolkit for that at least is on point.
    • ufmace 5y ago
      Their web console UIs vary widely by service. IMO, the UX for most of their simpler services, specifically SQS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, are really easy to use and work nicely. If you want to start with a Docker image, send it to AWS, and have it get spun up and attached to a DNS, well that's a huge complex mess to get set up.
      • Aeolun 5y ago
        Unless you use something like Terraform or Pulumi, in which case it’s almost a one liner.
  • dotproto 5y ago
    "They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].
• ggregoire 5y ago
  Not disagreeing with you (a view with all the active services would be great) but one of the many benefits of using Terraform is that it allows you to know what you running.
• bogota 5y ago
  Yep and is a huge SaaS market place now so mid to large size companies can figure out what they are spending money on. I don’t use them for any projects mostly because I already don’t enjoy having to manage AWS at work all the time. I also don’t want to live/work in a world where AWS is my only option so I try and use smaller hosting providers and services like tarsnap.
• thejosh 5y ago
  Why the f do I have to use a service like billgist to get a breakdown of my services? AWS billing IS complicated but could be made so much simpler...
  • Guest42 5y ago
    I agree, having set up serverless and lambda for an api/app that was to be used a few times per day, the billing made no sense at all, it would increase even though the services were used less and was difficult to find what the costs were or whether they could be reduced, eventually I had to shut it down and create a non-lambda solution somewhere else because I had little control of the cost.
  • kempbellt 5y ago
    I'll bite... Because, if you are a company that uses AWS at scale (deploying literally thousands of resources at a time), you care more about meeting demand and getting resources to spec, than you do about the cost of an individual elastic IP... The price of each individual resource isn't something that you want to see on every screen you touch. It literally clutters the console with information that you couldn't give a shit about when your company is making millions (or billions) on the services you provide. You care more about your service's reliability/scalability/uptime/etc than anything else. This is priority numero uno. If and when cost analysis becomes priority, you look to see where you may be overprovisioning resources - hence, the billing console. But for the larger players on AWS (the multi-billion dollar ones that AWS cares more about making happy than you or I), an extra $100k in AWS expenses in a year isn't a worry, it's a write-off.
    • bitexploder 5y ago
      You also get much better negotiated rates for everything when you are big.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  If I go to billing I can see an itemized breakdown of every service I'm using. What is wrong with that?
  • Buttons840 5y ago
    Students and self-learners want to experiment with doing complicated things on AWS without getting a surprise $3,000 bill because their script didn't shut down those instances like they thought it did. They want a hard fail-safe to protect them from surprise bills. And they want a solution that's easier and more reliable than checking the AWS itemized breakdown twice a day.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      I agree with that. That is why there are "Billing Alarms" in big letters on the billing page. But that wasn't the point of the reply: the person above me was complaining that there's no way to tell what services are being billed, which is bunk.
  • BackBlast 5y ago
    The breakdown isn't granular enough by far. ec2 is a very big bucket to go digging into for costs.
• StratusBen 5y ago
  Disclosure: I'm the Co-Founder of Vantage. This is exactly what we do with Vantage: http://vantage.sh/ http://vantage.sh/ We give point-in-time run-rates of all active resources based off of the region and resource/service configuration. In addition we try to simplify people's understanding of where their costs are coming from. If anyone needs help with this, they can personally reach out to me at ben@vantage.sh
  • nathanaldensr 5y ago
    With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.
    • jenniferli23 5y ago
      Yea they should, but if it doesn't, are you gonna keep waiting or do something about it?
      • KirillPanov 5y ago
        I would be more worried that if you do something about it, Amazon is gonna do something about you. Starting with obnoxious API changes, followed by ToS changes. Hopefully that's as far as it has to go.
      • johnghanks 5y ago
        If you're operating at a scale that would require something like vantage you probably don't need vantage as you have or will need to have a very good understanding of AWS infra / costs anyways.
    • therockspush 5y ago
      Agreed. Nothing new about this request. It's like hiring a plane to fly over your house repeatedly to tell you whether or not it's on fire. There has to be a better way.
      • 5y ago
• tapland 5y ago
  This is what keeps me from tinkering with the free tiers and never even attempt to host my own projects in the cloud. I want a free tier with a lock on it. I'd very much appreciate advice for what tiers would fit my monthly use if I hit free tier caps, but if I got hit with $500 right now I'd be ruined. I think my Google compute stuff is safe, but I really don't like having any doubt.
• singlow 5y ago
  I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets. At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service? AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments. The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create appropriate alerts. The permissions system lets you define very specific roles. Its complex. But if your system is complex, it gives you the tools to keep track of it all. If you have a <=$5000/month budget, it is probably too small to make sense in AWS. You can probably run your system on a couple servers.
  • hardwaregeek 5y ago
    Linux server administration requires a certain amount of know-how and determination. I can't tell you how many times I had to rebuild a DigitalOcean server because I messed something up and wanted to start with a clean slate. A lot of hackathons, workshops and courses ask you to use AWS these days. Whether it's to run machine learning instances, win a sponsor prize or learn how to use Lambda, students are often encouraged to learn one of the major cloud providers. Also it's a resume boost. It's another buzzword you can add to your resume.
  • theshrike79 5y ago
    > At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service? I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01. No, a VM wouldn't cut it. But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by using a VM or two with your own DB servers. And there's the one where you're so big it might actually be worth it to implement the whole stack yourself.
    • cosarara 5y ago
      > I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01. What kind of thing do they serve? Somewhere I could read more about this kind of project?
• apatters 5y ago
  Until AWS fixes this the best thing to do is just use their service as little as possible. There are plenty of other cloud providers out there these days which don't employ this hostile practice. I closed an AWS account for this reason just a few days ago, we hadn't used it for a while but there was no clear way to remove our credit card so it felt like a risk just to have it open, what if a developer logs in to mess around and accidentally flips some switch that smacks us with a charge of a couple grand... unlikely, sure, but the fact that it's even possible is terrible system design. Better to just nuke the account and move on to other cloud providers that don't make it harder for me to sleep at night.
• hinkley 5y ago
  AWS is literally trying to trick you. With friend like these, who needs enemies? The Trough of Disillusionment for AWS is going to be Bastille Day levels of ugly.