7 ms·

Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.

smilespray 5y ago
You're not alone. Feels like it's on purpose.
chx 5y ago
https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!
jedberg 5y ago
There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.
- PowerfulWizard 5y ago
  One thing that would make a difference on small accounts is the ability to do prepaid billing only. That way you define your budget in advance and they enforce it. The problem with the current billing is that people who are new to the system have no hope of understanding what is going on and they have to accept the open-ended nature of the billing system to learn.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    AWS Lightsail is pretty close to this. It’s still possible to get an overage if you have a lot of traffic, but otherwise it’s pretty safe.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    One issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want. You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Your script could just shut everything down and delete everything, or do whatever is appropriate for your account. That's their solution to this. Also they don't have instant feedback on usage -> cost. They batch process it. So if you get a huge spike in usage, AWS may not even know that for a while. They could in theory be willing to eat the cost of usage between it happening and their processing, but are probably unwilling.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      Yeah, shut off EC2 instances, block access to all resources, etc. Preserve bucket data and other storage for N days or $M max allowance (ultimately billable) before deleting. AWS could limit how much storage they make available to someone with a budget, reducing their risk substantially. It's pretty easy stuff, IMO, but the upside for them is low -- after all they are already #1.
      - jedberg 5y ago
        That might work for you, but not everyone. They might even have legal trouble with such a system, if they delete data that was required to be retained for example. You're not thinking of all the edge cases.
        EricE 5y ago
        Why is data remotely their problem? If you don't have your data backed up in something other than Amazon, Amazon is the LEAST of your worries.
    - PowerfulWizard 5y ago
      There must be a process for unpaid bills, whatever that process is they could just enact it at the user's threshold instead of their own threshold. Ideally a soft limit that would disable networking and resource creation and then later a hard limit where your account is wiped out. Because of the potential overhang before the billing system catches up I think it would be appropriate to lower the service quotas on this type of account. I'm not sure if the customer can lower their own quotas which would be an alternate cost control strategy but a beginner wouldn't know to think of that anyway. The solution with billing alerts is good at a company level but too much for a beginner in my opinion. I know unexpected costs were a concern for me when I started using AWS as a student in 2008 and it is still a concern for people in the same situation, just with so much more complexity on top of it all. It will be a tiny fragment of their revenue but as time goes on a higher and higher level of expertise is required to get started, even though you can accomplish a lot with just the free tier. The amount of progress they've made on this issue in the last 13 years is just not impressive.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  > The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs. That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.
  - stillicidious 5y ago
    It's a valid one. Engineering teams work with AWS kinda in the same way mass market 90s C code was written. They get it running, but boy are there huge leaks and crashes hiding in plain sight. From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- handrous 5y ago
  > There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses that exist only because the UI for the major cloud providers is terrible. Stuff like security auditing or even telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so painful that it's worth paying someone else to provide a better UI. Same for billing.
- ericd 5y ago
  Their egress bandwidth pricing definitely wasn't designed to meet my needs. I forget how many orders of magnitude above market it was when I priced it out, but it was ugly.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    The complexity is to meet customer needs, not the prices themselves. But aren't you glad they have bandwidth tiers so the more you use the cheaper it gets? :)
    - ericd 5y ago
      Heh I suppose, you do pay just for the parts you use, even if you end up paying a lot more as a result :-)
andy_ppp 5y ago
I think there is a class action law suit waiting to happen to be honest, it's clearly deliberate and everyone who has set up AWS personally is being charged $2-5 per month for services that are still running but they cannot find. As long as Jeff gets richer.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Jeff’s not in charge anymore. Andy Jassy is. And I think some things will be changing for the better with Andy.
kovek 5y ago
I just learned that I need to pay aws 400$ for last month. I was thinking it would be 50$.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's your fault, because you haven't read something, you misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS team charitably decided they will forgive them just this time, how nice of them! Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever happen.
  - avidphantasm 5y ago
    Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Use a prepaid credit card. Boom. Protected
      - stavros 5y ago
        privacy.com is great for this.
        bradknowles 5y ago
        Except they are in the process of changing their bank that they work with, so that they can change the type of cards they issue, and you have until the end of December to change over all your old cards from the old format to the new one, which means changing the card numbers, too. This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them. If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.
bstar77 5y ago
After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and moved on. Never again, I'll use Linode or something else instead. I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead might have had something to do with it.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  With AWS, you can set up billing rules to notify you of any charges over any limit you want, and you can break that down by service or overall charges, etc…. You learn a lot about this process when you become an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. Sadly, they don’t turn these things on by default. You have to know about them in advance, and you have to know how to configure them. That’s one thing I wish they would improve.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  The disk you attach to an instance is not free, and capacity/performance characteristics dictate price.
  - bstar77 5y ago
    It's possible that was the issue, but I estimated a 20gb storage partition. Maybe usage was to blame, I know the server was inefficient with reads and writes.
    - kondro 5y ago
      But what did you actually assign? EBS volumes are priced based on provisioned capacity (including throughput if you choose io2 volumes).
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Use a service with max cap built in such as Hetzner. [0] [0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1 https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1
tedivm 5y ago
I'm honestly at the point where I assume the AWS Console is awful on purpose as a way to drive people towards infrastructure as code. It's just so awful that it can't be on purpose (I hope).
- etxm 5y ago
  Wait until they see how awful IaC is.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    In what sense? Terraform is treating me quite well.
selfhoster11 5y ago
You may not be that far off from the truth. It took me a paid course (though, admittedly at a deep discount and for basically no money for a professional) to understand the purpose of the VPC section of the AWS control panel. And a while later, to understand why the items on the left-hand side are grouped in such a seemingly nonsensical way. Now that I know this complexity, I can't unlearn it. But for everyone else, I would just recommend Digital Ocean, Scaleway or Hetzner.
tialaramex 5y ago
I'm not a Microsoft fan (he writes from his Linux desktop) but I was astonished that Azure actually has working "This is how much we can spend, and literally no more" behaviour coming from previously working with AWS where that's either entirely unavailable or black magic known only to experts. Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead. Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.
- easton 5y ago
  Oddly, there's certain things in Azure that don't work with the credits feature, like spot instances. I'm not sure why, but it's awesome for not blowing up my bank account because I did something wrong.
dheera 5y ago
Especially if I google "ec2 pricing" I don't land on a page with $ signs on it. That's really freaking annoying. Even if I hit the "General Purpose" link on the page I land on, I STILL don't land on a page with $ signs on it. Seriously, I don't even know where they list the damn pricing anymore. It used to be listed out plain and simple on the first page you landed on with a region selector.

smilespray 5y ago

You're not alone. Feels like it's on purpose.

chx 5y ago

https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!

jedberg 5y ago

There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.

PowerfulWizard 5y ago
One thing that would make a difference on small accounts is the ability to do prepaid billing only. That way you define your budget in advance and they enforce it. The problem with the current billing is that people who are new to the system have no hope of understanding what is going on and they have to accept the open-ended nature of the billing system to learn.
- danielheath 5y ago
  AWS Lightsail is pretty close to this. It’s still possible to get an overage if you have a lot of traffic, but otherwise it’s pretty safe.
- jedberg 5y ago
  One issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want. You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Your script could just shut everything down and delete everything, or do whatever is appropriate for your account. That's their solution to this. Also they don't have instant feedback on usage -> cost. They batch process it. So if you get a huge spike in usage, AWS may not even know that for a while. They could in theory be willing to eat the cost of usage between it happening and their processing, but are probably unwilling.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Yeah, shut off EC2 instances, block access to all resources, etc. Preserve bucket data and other storage for N days or $M max allowance (ultimately billable) before deleting. AWS could limit how much storage they make available to someone with a budget, reducing their risk substantially. It's pretty easy stuff, IMO, but the upside for them is low -- after all they are already #1.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      That might work for you, but not everyone. They might even have legal trouble with such a system, if they delete data that was required to be retained for example. You're not thinking of all the edge cases.
      - EricE 5y ago
        Why is data remotely their problem? If you don't have your data backed up in something other than Amazon, Amazon is the LEAST of your worries.
  - PowerfulWizard 5y ago
    There must be a process for unpaid bills, whatever that process is they could just enact it at the user's threshold instead of their own threshold. Ideally a soft limit that would disable networking and resource creation and then later a hard limit where your account is wiped out. Because of the potential overhang before the billing system catches up I think it would be appropriate to lower the service quotas on this type of account. I'm not sure if the customer can lower their own quotas which would be an alternate cost control strategy but a beginner wouldn't know to think of that anyway. The solution with billing alerts is good at a company level but too much for a beginner in my opinion. I know unexpected costs were a concern for me when I started using AWS as a student in 2008 and it is still a concern for people in the same situation, just with so much more complexity on top of it all. It will be a tiny fragment of their revenue but as time goes on a higher and higher level of expertise is required to get started, even though you can accomplish a lot with just the free tier. The amount of progress they've made on this issue in the last 13 years is just not impressive.
gunapologist99 5y ago
> The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs. That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.
- stillicidious 5y ago
  It's a valid one. Engineering teams work with AWS kinda in the same way mass market 90s C code was written. They get it running, but boy are there huge leaks and crashes hiding in plain sight. From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
handrous 5y ago
> There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses that exist only because the UI for the major cloud providers is terrible. Stuff like security auditing or even telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so painful that it's worth paying someone else to provide a better UI. Same for billing.
ericd 5y ago
Their egress bandwidth pricing definitely wasn't designed to meet my needs. I forget how many orders of magnitude above market it was when I priced it out, but it was ugly.
- jedberg 5y ago
  The complexity is to meet customer needs, not the prices themselves. But aren't you glad they have bandwidth tiers so the more you use the cheaper it gets? :)
  - ericd 5y ago
    Heh I suppose, you do pay just for the parts you use, even if you end up paying a lot more as a result :-)

andy_ppp 5y ago

I think there is a class action law suit waiting to happen to be honest, it's clearly deliberate and everyone who has set up AWS personally is being charged $2-5 per month for services that are still running but they cannot find. As long as Jeff gets richer.

bradknowles 5y ago
Jeff’s not in charge anymore. Andy Jassy is. And I think some things will be changing for the better with Andy.

kovek 5y ago

I just learned that I need to pay aws 400$ for last month. I was thinking it would be 50$.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's your fault, because you haven't read something, you misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS team charitably decided they will forgive them just this time, how nice of them! Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever happen.
- avidphantasm 5y ago
  Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Use a prepaid credit card. Boom. Protected
    - stavros 5y ago
      privacy.com is great for this.
      - bradknowles 5y ago
        Except they are in the process of changing their bank that they work with, so that they can change the type of cards they issue, and you have until the end of December to change over all your old cards from the old format to the new one, which means changing the card numbers, too. This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them. If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.

bstar77 5y ago

After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and moved on. Never again, I'll use Linode or something else instead. I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead might have had something to do with it.

bradknowles 5y ago
With AWS, you can set up billing rules to notify you of any charges over any limit you want, and you can break that down by service or overall charges, etc…. You learn a lot about this process when you become an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. Sadly, they don’t turn these things on by default. You have to know about them in advance, and you have to know how to configure them. That’s one thing I wish they would improve.
whalesalad 5y ago
The disk you attach to an instance is not free, and capacity/performance characteristics dictate price.
- bstar77 5y ago
  It's possible that was the issue, but I estimated a 20gb storage partition. Maybe usage was to blame, I know the server was inefficient with reads and writes.
  - kondro 5y ago
    But what did you actually assign? EBS volumes are priced based on provisioned capacity (including throughput if you choose io2 volumes).

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Use a service with max cap built in such as Hetzner. [0] [0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1 https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1

tedivm 5y ago

I'm honestly at the point where I assume the AWS Console is awful on purpose as a way to drive people towards infrastructure as code. It's just so awful that it can't be on purpose (I hope).

etxm 5y ago
Wait until they see how awful IaC is.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  In what sense? Terraform is treating me quite well.

selfhoster11 5y ago

You may not be that far off from the truth. It took me a paid course (though, admittedly at a deep discount and for basically no money for a professional) to understand the purpose of the VPC section of the AWS control panel. And a while later, to understand why the items on the left-hand side are grouped in such a seemingly nonsensical way. Now that I know this complexity, I can't unlearn it. But for everyone else, I would just recommend Digital Ocean, Scaleway or Hetzner.

tialaramex 5y ago

I'm not a Microsoft fan (he writes from his Linux desktop) but I was astonished that Azure actually has working "This is how much we can spend, and literally no more" behaviour coming from previously working with AWS where that's either entirely unavailable or black magic known only to experts. Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead. Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.

easton 5y ago
Oddly, there's certain things in Azure that don't work with the credits feature, like spot instances. I'm not sure why, but it's awesome for not blowing up my bank account because I did something wrong.

dheera 5y ago

Especially if I google "ec2 pricing" I don't land on a page with $ signs on it. That's really freaking annoying. Even if I hit the "General Purpose" link on the page I land on, I STILL don't land on a page with $ signs on it. Seriously, I don't even know where they list the damn pricing anymore. It used to be listed out plain and simple on the first page you landed on with a region selector.