6 ms·

I often find Amazon pricing to be vague and cryptic, sometimes there's literally no way to tell ehy, for example, your database cost is fluctuating all the time

joseda-hg 1y ago
Amazon pricing is nice if you compare it to Azure...
crinkly 1y ago
Yeah that. We moved to AWS using their best practices and enterprise cost estimation stuff and got a 6x cost increment on something that was supposed to be cheaper and now we’re fucked because we can’t get out. It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations. The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.
- bufferoverflow 1y ago
  [dead]
- ajb 1y ago
  Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Yeah we have many accounts. Hence why I know ours cheap. Difficult to break it down within the account as you say without tag maintenance.
  - bumblehean 1y ago
    > They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly. The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards. A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scps_examples_tagging.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...
- AtheistOfFail 1y ago
  > The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not a bug, a feature.
graemep 1y ago
If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you. I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists. Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
  - mort96 1y ago
    I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider. You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
    - graemep 1y ago
      > You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
      - mort96 1y ago
UltraSane 1y ago
AWS pricing is actually extremely clearly specified but it is hard to predict your costs unless you have a good understanding of your expected usage.
- IX-103 1y ago
  They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run. If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on. AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file? While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.

joseda-hg 1y ago

Amazon pricing is nice if you compare it to Azure...

crinkly 1y ago

Yeah that. We moved to AWS using their best practices and enterprise cost estimation stuff and got a 6x cost increment on something that was supposed to be cheaper and now we’re fucked because we can’t get out. It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations. The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.

bufferoverflow 1y ago
[dead]
ajb 1y ago
Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
- crinkly 1y ago
  Yeah we have many accounts. Hence why I know ours cheap. Difficult to break it down within the account as you say without tag maintenance.
- bumblehean 1y ago
  > They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly. The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards. A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scps_examples_tagging.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...
AtheistOfFail 1y ago
> The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not a bug, a feature.

graemep 1y ago

If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you. I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago
But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists. Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
- mort96 1y ago
  I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider. You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
  - graemep 1y ago
    > You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
    - mort96 1y ago

UltraSane 1y ago

AWS pricing is actually extremely clearly specified but it is hard to predict your costs unless you have a good understanding of your expected usage.

IX-103 1y ago
They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run. If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on. AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file? While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.