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Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a f

• Lucasoato 5mo ago
  > They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. > The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices. I don’t even think that using the UI to spin up the machine is the right way to do that in an enterprise setting, you should always do that through Infrastructure as Code, to know exactly what you have up and running, just by looking at that as you would with any program. I’d suggest to use the UI for simple testing, for which the costs are often (but not always) negligible. Jeff Bezos if you see this please send me some cash.
  • bulletsvshumans 5mo ago
    They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.
    • mlhpdx 5mo ago
      For which services? Let’s look at Lambda for a second. Deploying a lambda function to AWS costs literally nothing. And yet, depending on how it’s used, it can cost an infinite amount of money. Which price should it show? There are far more sevices like Lambda than EC2.
      • dingaling 5mo ago
        > Which price should it show? "Estimated cost per 1000 invocations"
  • finaard 5mo ago
    I've been in a similar situation - a surprising amount of companies really just click to create instances. Last time I've encountered that at a customer I improved things a bit by creating templates, and scripting instance creation based on those templates - but ideally we'd have had the templates themselves as well as the network side generated by ansible. But that's the problem: The complexity of doing that properly is pretty much the same as just doing your own hardware (which is what I'm working with most of the time - handling stuff on physical servers). And at that point the question should be why you're paying AWS so much money and pay your people to automate AWS workflows when you could just pay them to automate workflows on physical hardware, which would be way cheaper to run than the AWS instances.
  • richwater 5mo ago
    The faster people realize AWS hates the need for a UI, the better. It should really be a read-only layer for metadata and logs.
    • mlhpdx 5mo ago
      At this point I’m not using the UX much if ever. Everything I’m doing is via IaC or the CLI. It’s made working with AWS really smooth.
      • DANmode 5mo ago
        Pedantry: You’re having a smooth UX (or DX) by not using the UI.
  • lr1970 5mo ago
    > pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices. Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.
  • whateverboat 5mo ago
    I must disagree so heavily with you here. Prices can depend on so many factors, but.... when that particular account is choosing that particular machine, AWS knows what it will cost, and they can show it to them dynamically. It's very difficult to be convinced in this day and age that you cannot have a dynamic price chart right beside the machine sellector which is showing or calculating prices in real time for that particular product. About using IaaC to set-up the infrastructure, sure, but sometimes you just need to browse stuff before actually writing code to get a feel.
  • sudosteph 5mo ago
    I'm with you. Nobody serious uses the UI to make changes with AWS. At the very least, use the AWS CLI. IaaS is the norm though. I'm tired of people acting like complex infrastructure tooling is adversarial because it's not completely intuitive. Infrastructure is hard. AWS can give you tooling and docs with patterns to follow, but they can't read your mind. Neither can the PaaS providers - they just make choices on your behalf and hope it won't matter to you.
    • esseph 5mo ago
      > I'm with you. Nobody serious uses the UI to make changes with AWS. This is still hugely prevalent at some of the largest companies in the world
      • mlhpdx 5mo ago
        Not hugely, perhaps not even prevalent, but present, yes. I get to see how a lot of companies use AWS. The console does make its appearances, but less and less often these days.
  • swasheck 5mo ago
    the pricing “API” is also a joke so it’s not like they have tried pushing people to apis and away from the console. i just use vantage (https://instances.vantage.sh/ https://instances.vantage.sh/) now. their api is functional and reasonable.
  • lambda 5mo ago
    Tell me how I can easily determine the price from my IaC deployment as well. Heck, I even have a hard time telling the price I pay on an account by account basis; because we have savings plans, those get charged against the root account and then I see $0 spent on EC2 in the individual account because it's all covered with a savings plan. And when I'm putting together that IaC and trying to decide which new instance type to upgrade to, I have to dig through multiple confusing interfaces to figure out that what I want is to upgrade from m8a.4xlarge to c8a.8xlarge and how much that is going to cost me.
    • mlhpdx 5mo ago
      In cost explore, on the right hand side where filters appear, click the “more” button at the bottom then the first option that appears (which is “charge type” or something like that) and select “usage”. That will give you a view of what you’re using regardless of the savings plan, etc.
      • lambda 5mo ago
        Thanks for the tip, but I tried that and I still see $0 for EC2-Instances, while if I look at Savings Plan coverage breakdown, I can see 100% of costs being covered by savings plans, broken down by instance family, but that view doesn't let me see things broken down by tag or any of the other ways you can view it in Cost Explorer.
  • evilduck 5mo ago
    > I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices. If they know how to bill you then they obviously know how to consider and calculate all of these factors, they just choose not to show you up front.
• chuckadams 5mo ago
  AWS actually has a pretty good price calculator with some decent presets (but FFS, can I have an "uncheck all" button?) but of course it's an entirely separate app. Amazon naturally wants some friction to having this pricing information handy, though I suspect the main reason has to do with Conway's Law: AWS still ships their org chart.
• zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago
  I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI. If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS. Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating the cost becomes an art rather than an exact science. And if you don't use these, there is no point of using AWS, there are plenty of "cheap" VPS providers.
  • PLenz 5mo ago
    If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.
    • zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago
      They don't know in advance how much bandwidth will you use, how much traffic will you have, what auto-scaling rule will it trigger, etc. It's not obfuscation, it's billing based on your usage. And as with everything in life, there are tradeoffs.
      • sillyfluke 5mo ago
        Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.
        • simondotau 5mo ago
          IMHO it should be illegal to force consumers to have an infinite spending limit on a post-paid service with consumption charges. If I want to cap my unpaid expenditure at any amount, I should be legally entitled to do so.
        • zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago
          You can set up cost-based alerts (actual or forecasted) that send notifications via email or SNS. Based on this you can set up automations, such as applying an IAM policy to prevent further resource creation, shut down resources, etc.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• fatata123 5mo ago
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• tcp_handshaker 5mo ago
  >> The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...
  • nullstyle 5mo ago
    Not back when i was using AWS
  • Capricorn2481 5mo ago
    You can upload an image to imgur and show us. I don't see this.
  • dekhn 5mo ago
    I do see prices when I look at the instance selection box. "On-demand linux base pricing: 0.0104 USD per hour" for t3.micro (matching the published pricing). it does not show the full price (based on any additional volumes or other configuration details). It gets far more complicated when you have reserved instances, and combine reserved instances with RAM sharing when working in a larger org.
• aurareturn 5mo ago
  Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow. I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. It looked horrible. Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX. My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture. Edit: It wasn't intentional
  • Y-bar 5mo ago
    Judging by how much things jump around on the screen when I navigate from one view to another I agree.
  • epistasis 5mo ago
    I would argue that the intentions don't matter at all, the end result is all that matters both for the buyer and seller. In systems design, it is often said that The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Good intentions can produce very bad systems with bad outcomes, and neutral/bad intentions can create good systems that benefit everyone. I think that applies both to Amazon's dev system and pricing system. From what I hear about the insides, alignment is chaotic neutral inside of Amazon, but that shouldn't affect how we judge the system itself.
  • temp8830 5mo ago
    AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.
    • AgentOrange1234 5mo ago
      FWIW, my team in AWS had help from UI designers who were cool people that impressed me with their work. We definitely had to push through some needless organizational friction, e.g., they were in a different org and frequently got left out of meetings, whereas we should really have been acting as one team. I don't think we saw it as everyone for themselves, we really tried to make it work and had a good, trusting relationship. In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.
• parliament32 5mo ago
  That's one of the things I like about Azure, they don't overwhelm you with listing prices beside every individual item as you're creating it, but they seem to always present a price on things that could be expensive. It's a good balance, I have yet to be surprised by a charge.
  • tcp_handshaker 5mo ago
    Using Azure in 2026 should be a firing offense. How many cross-tenant incidents are enough for you? In 20 years of existence of AWS ( since 2006 and S3 ) show me ONE with AWS ... and I will publicly eat my hat here... "Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_are_quack/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
    • bdangubic 5mo ago
      It should 100% be fireable offense if you have a choice
      • andreashaerter 5mo ago
        > if you have a choice I just read: > If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault. so... :)
        • jnovek 5mo ago
          Regardless of whether the metaphor stands up, this is a horrible thing to say. Abuse victims are not responsible for the abuse they receive.
          • reactordev 5mo ago
            No but they have the power to remove themselves from the situation and should have a prudence to do so. We have places for women and children to go to escape abuse, so find your hideout and escape the abusive relationship.
• hypeatei 5mo ago
  So this project had a three month timeline and provisioning the cloud resources maybe took an extra hour or two because of crosschecking? I actually prefer the dedicated calculator pages and product pages because it gives you more insight into how things are billed. I think this is a strange thing to get hung up on, IMHO, especially as a lead / manager of developers.
• ivan_gammel 5mo ago
  This is the only correct way to do it: choose infrastructure provider that can help you deliver. AWS is good, just not for everyone. It stands somewhere between services like Heroku and bare metal, abstracting a lot of maintenance, but offering some control over scaling architecture. Which means that as a cloud provider it helps to scale, not to build the cheapest and simplest setup possible. If you have VC money and pitch growth, AWS might be a safe choice - 2 years of startup credits they offer via accelerator programs help you not to bother too much about your infra budget and build first 18 months before you start optimizing spending (and then you know it, have good forecasting etc). If you are bootstrapped or indie developer, choose what you can afford and choose something simple. Hetzner, DO etc will work fine.
• b40d-48b2-979e 5mo ago
  if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault. This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • DANmode 5mo ago
    > [if] you have the option to walk out, and you don’t Ignores nothing, and blames no victim. It advises people to avoid becoming one when possible.
    • rmunn 5mo ago
      "all that follows is your own fault" does blame the victim. The abuse is definitely NOT the victim's fault, it's 100% the fault of the abuser. (Most of the time; I won't say there are never mutually-abusive relationships, but most of the time it's one way). Thing about abusive relationships is, though, many (I would go so far as to say "most" but I'm no expert on the numbers) people in one have lots of options to walk out... but they either don't know they can walk out, or they don't feel that they can. So telling them it's their own fault for leaving, when they didn't really understand that leaving was an option, does blame them unfairly. Now, when the analogy is employee-employer, the "don't feel that they can" so often doesn't apply: the psychological reason for not leaving ("but I love him!") is almost never something the employee feels. But the "I feel trapped" reason (it's the only job I could find that makes nearly the money I need for my mortgage, if I leave then we might lose the house, etc.) VERY often applies. EDIT to add this P.S.: I understand the intent of saying that was to advise people "Hey, walk away when you get the chance, otherwise everything that happens to you was 100% avoidable". But saying "it's your fault" is going too far. I've seen people claim that statements purely intended as advice (like "Hey, if you park your car in THAT neighborhood, you might wanna lock your doors and not leave any valuables in sight so nobody smashes your window") are victim-blaming. But it's really, really about the phrasing. The example I gave was definitely NOT victim blaming. Saying "Well, you were asking for it by parking your car there" WOULD be victim-blaming. The way it's phrased is very important. And saying "all that follows is your fault" is most definitely wrongly blaming the victim.
• okeuro49 5mo ago
  When I log into AWS there is a big graph saying "Cost savings" and offers all the different ways to save money. The idea that AWS is abusive seems a bit much to me. There is Amazon Lightsail for people who prefer pay-monthly upfront costs.
  • testbjjl 5mo ago
    Have you tried to use this feature? From my experience it’s typically reserved instances that provide discounts for longer contracts. It feels a lot like cable TV to me. I think the interface is difficult to use but am able to get what I want from the CLI and some scripts I have aliased.
• clickety_clack 5mo ago
  People don’t seem to realize how simple pricing can be made for the user. I switched to digital ocean too, and it’s great. I think people think it’s not really engineering if it’s not complicated, so they stick with these insane AWS/GCP/Azure setups. But it’s not 2012 anymore, this stuff has been figured out and commoditized, and managing your cloud setup should be “easy” for 99% of products. Edit: and when I say “99% of products”, I mean “99% of products where the team thinks they are building something too complicated for a simple setup”
  • zrobotics 5mo ago
    Plus, I've never understood the argument that cloud is better because you don't need to deal with the complexity of managing a server. Yes, it's a very deep topic and there's a lot of nuances to managing a Linux box serving web content, but we've been doing that for decades and there is tons of information and tooling available. Every time I've needed to manage something on AWS I've been shocked at just how over wrought the whole system is. There's tons of As-specific terminology for everything, and lots of stuff is tremendously complicated to manage. I can definitely understand why companies need to hire people who are experts in AWS specifically, it's complicated enough to justify that. However, for me personally I'd rather learn more traditional sysadmin systems. The skills are more evergreen, and I'd rather spend my time learning open systems than one tech giant's specific system. About 6 months ago I needed to migrate some of our systems from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. It was a 2 day process that was very painless. The only complicated bit was managing the DNS switchover with zero downtime. If we were moving those same 3 components from AWS to GCP or Azure, it would have involved needing to rearchitect and rewrite a lot of software.
• cyberax 5mo ago
  > The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I'm sorry, what? I just tried the EC2 launch wizard, and the price is listed right in the dropdown with the instance types. Or you can open a table with comparisons and enable the price there, along with ~20 other instance type properties. Yeah, the AWS UI is not great. But they go out of way to make pricing predictable and public.
• mips_avatar 5mo ago
  They have to do that because their pricing is bad. Like if you want to run a custom vector db you can run it 20x cheaper on hetzner than aws.
• ransom1538 5mo ago
  There will be no greater engineering feat than the ability to set a spending cap. FAANG is filled with brilliant people working alongside the smartest AI of our time, yet somehow the ability to set a spending cap has eluded some of the best engineers on the planet for over a decade. Einstein split the atom. Newton explained gravity. Musk can land rockets backwards on floating platforms in the ocean. But none of them could answer the ultimate question: How do I stop AWS from charging me $47k because someone forgot to turn off a Kubernetes cluster?
• fragmede 5mo ago
  > I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price. Okay but https://ec2instances.info/ https://ec2instances.info/ is right there. It's valid to point out that you shouldn't have to do that, but sometimes you just have to live with the relationships you have.
• wodenokoto 5mo ago
  Almost every organization I’ve worked for has setup their cloud such that: A) they are receiving massive discounts off of list prices, and B) they’ve setup everything such that no-one working on the cloud can see the spend. Companies just really don’t want employees to know what their spend is.