5 ms·

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expert, but I've seen all kinds of ugly cracks and discontinuities in design and operation among the services. AWS has felt like a handful of very good ideas, designed, built, and maintained by completely separate teams, littered by a whole ton of "I need my promotion to VP" bad ideas that build on top of the good ones in increasingly hacky ways. And in any sufficiently large tech orgnization, there won't be anyone at a level of power who can rattle cages about a problem like this, who will want to be the one to do actually it. No "VP of Such and Such" will spend their political capital stressing how critical it is that they fix the thing that will make a whole bunch of KPIs go in the wrong direction. They're probably spending it on shipping another hacked-together service with Web2.0-- er. IOT-- er. Blockchai-- er. Crypto-- er. AI before promotion season.

colechristensen 1y ago
AWS isn't for tinkerers and doesn't have guard rails for them, that's it. Anybody can use it but it's not designed for you to spend $12 per month. They DO have cost anomaly monitoring, they give you data so you can set up your own alerts for usage or data, but it's not a primary feature because they're picking their customers and it isn't the bottom of the market hobbyist. There are plenty of other services looking for that segment. I have budgets set up and alerts through a separate alerting service that pings me if my estimates go above what I've set for a month. But it wouldn't fix a short term mistake; I don't need it to.
lysace 1y ago
All of that is by design, in a bad way.
scotty79 1y ago
> I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious It wasn't when the service was first created. What's intentionally malicious is not fixing it for years. Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens. It's easy to guess why. Unlike hosting infra bs, inference is a hard cost for them. If they don't get paid, they lose (more) money. And sending stuff to collections is expensive and bad press.
- otterley 1y ago
  > Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens. That’s not a completely accurate characterization of what’s been happening. AI coding agent startups like Cursor and Windsurf started by attracting developers with free or deeply discounted tokens, then adjusted the pricing as they figure out how to be profitable. This happened with Kiro too[1] and is happening now with Google’s Antigravity. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on HN about this practice. [1] disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own
  - gbear605 1y ago
    I think you’re talking about a different thing? The bad practice from AWS et al is that you post-pay for your usage, so usage can be any amount. With all the AI things I’ve seen, either: - you prepay a fixed amount (“$200/mo for ChatGPT Max”) - you deposit money upfront into a wallet, if the wallet runs out of cash then you can’t generate any more tokens - it’s free! I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.
sgarland 1y ago
> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I dunno, Aurora’s pricing structure feels an awful lot like that. “What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”
- zdc1 1y ago
  A year ago I did a back of the napkin calculation and was surprised when I realised Aurora would cost the same or more as my current RDS for Postgres setup. Any discussion with costs inevitably has someone chiming in with a "have you considered Aurora?" and I don't quite understand why it's so loved.
  - belter 1y ago
    The business and technical argument for Aurora is that it delivers significantly higher performance for the same underlying hardware compared to MySQL or PostgreSQL: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmod-17.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmo... Even if you are not currently hitting performance limits of your current engine, Aurora would maintain the same throughput and latency on smaller instance classes. Which is where the potential cost savings come from... On top of that, with Aurora Serverless with variable and unpredictable workloads you could have important cost savings.
    - sgarland 1y ago
      Except it isn’t nearly as fast as it claims [0]. And in real-world tests, I have never found it to beat RDS. You can get an insane amount of performance out of a well-tuned MySQL or Postgres instance, especially if you’ve designed your schema to exploit your RDBMS’ strengths (e.g. taking advantage of InnoDB’s clustering index to minimize page fetches for N:M relationships). And if you really need high performance, you use an instance with node-local NVMe storage (and deal with the ephemerality, of course). 0: https://hackmysql.com/are-aurora-performance-claims-true/ https://hackmysql.com/are-aurora-performance-claims-true/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
duped 1y ago
> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. It's someone in a Patagonia vest trying to avoid getting PIP'd.
jjav 1y ago
> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. Unfortunately, that's not correct. A multi-trillion dollar company most absolutely has not just such a person, but many departments with hundreds of people tasked with precisely that, maximizing revenue by exploting every dark pattern they can possibly think of.
- next_xibalba 1y ago
  > Unfortunately, that's not correct It would be good to provide a factual basis for such a confident contradiction of the GP. This reads as “no, your opinion is wrong because my opinion is right”.
parliament32 1y ago
> I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it The lack of business case is the most likely culprit. "You want to put engineering resources into something that only the $100/mo guys are going to use?" You might be tempted to think "but my big org will use that", but I can guarantee compliance will shut it down -- you will never be permitted to enable a feature that intentionally causes hard downtime when (some external factor) happens.

colechristensen 1y ago

AWS isn't for tinkerers and doesn't have guard rails for them, that's it. Anybody can use it but it's not designed for you to spend $12 per month. They DO have cost anomaly monitoring, they give you data so you can set up your own alerts for usage or data, but it's not a primary feature because they're picking their customers and it isn't the bottom of the market hobbyist. There are plenty of other services looking for that segment. I have budgets set up and alerts through a separate alerting service that pings me if my estimates go above what I've set for a month. But it wouldn't fix a short term mistake; I don't need it to.

lysace 1y ago

All of that is by design, in a bad way.

scotty79 1y ago

> I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious It wasn't when the service was first created. What's intentionally malicious is not fixing it for years. Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens. It's easy to guess why. Unlike hosting infra bs, inference is a hard cost for them. If they don't get paid, they lose (more) money. And sending stuff to collections is expensive and bad press.

otterley 1y ago
> Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens. That’s not a completely accurate characterization of what’s been happening. AI coding agent startups like Cursor and Windsurf started by attracting developers with free or deeply discounted tokens, then adjusted the pricing as they figure out how to be profitable. This happened with Kiro too[1] and is happening now with Google’s Antigravity. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on HN about this practice. [1] disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own
- gbear605 1y ago
  I think you’re talking about a different thing? The bad practice from AWS et al is that you post-pay for your usage, so usage can be any amount. With all the AI things I’ve seen, either: - you prepay a fixed amount (“$200/mo for ChatGPT Max”) - you deposit money upfront into a wallet, if the wallet runs out of cash then you can’t generate any more tokens - it’s free! I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.

sgarland 1y ago

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I dunno, Aurora’s pricing structure feels an awful lot like that. “What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”

zdc1 1y ago
A year ago I did a back of the napkin calculation and was surprised when I realised Aurora would cost the same or more as my current RDS for Postgres setup. Any discussion with costs inevitably has someone chiming in with a "have you considered Aurora?" and I don't quite understand why it's so loved.
- belter 1y ago
  The business and technical argument for Aurora is that it delivers significantly higher performance for the same underlying hardware compared to MySQL or PostgreSQL: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmod-17.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmo... Even if you are not currently hitting performance limits of your current engine, Aurora would maintain the same throughput and latency on smaller instance classes. Which is where the potential cost savings come from... On top of that, with Aurora Serverless with variable and unpredictable workloads you could have important cost savings.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Except it isn’t nearly as fast as it claims [0]. And in real-world tests, I have never found it to beat RDS. You can get an insane amount of performance out of a well-tuned MySQL or Postgres instance, especially if you’ve designed your schema to exploit your RDBMS’ strengths (e.g. taking advantage of InnoDB’s clustering index to minimize page fetches for N:M relationships). And if you really need high performance, you use an instance with node-local NVMe storage (and deal with the ephemerality, of course). 0: https://hackmysql.com/are-aurora-performance-claims-true/ https://hackmysql.com/are-aurora-performance-claims-true/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

duped 1y ago

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. It's someone in a Patagonia vest trying to avoid getting PIP'd.

jjav 1y ago

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. Unfortunately, that's not correct. A multi-trillion dollar company most absolutely has not just such a person, but many departments with hundreds of people tasked with precisely that, maximizing revenue by exploting every dark pattern they can possibly think of.

next_xibalba 1y ago
> Unfortunately, that's not correct It would be good to provide a factual basis for such a confident contradiction of the GP. This reads as “no, your opinion is wrong because my opinion is right”.

parliament32 1y ago

> I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it The lack of business case is the most likely culprit. "You want to put engineering resources into something that only the $100/mo guys are going to use?" You might be tempted to think "but my big org will use that", but I can guarantee compliance will shut it down -- you will never be permitted to enable a feature that intentionally causes hard downtime when (some external factor) happens.