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> 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 relati

> 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.

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.