[natekupp]

I'm constantly surprised by how much work Amazon expects its customers to do themselves. The work that Segment has done here should be a service provided by AWS directly, continuously updating cost data in a Redshift database without any customer work required.

We just migrated our data infrastructure to GCP. One of the big motivators was experiences like this with AWS. We've got near-realtime GCP cost dashboards in BigQuery, and the only meaningful work on our end to make that happen was writing the SQL queries.

[jdc0589]

Agreed. I don't know why Amazon (and Azure) make this so hard. I've done something pretty similar to what Segment did (except it supports normalizing stats from Azure and AWS), and 90% of the work is stuff you don't feel like you should have to be doing.

[imron]

> I don't know why Amazon (and Azure) make this so hard.

The company posting this recently managed to save $1,000,000 annually on their AWS bill.

Having confusing billing makes it harder to spot that you're paying too much.

[j_s]

Yes I think the motivation is clear.

It is the same reason Dropbox doesn't include anything in the web interface to find large files.

--

Edit: tossing in some options to accomplish this; not really related to the current discussion:

Space usage analyser for Dropbox? | https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/47440/space-usag...

Unclouded - Cloud Manager | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cgollner.u...

[deno]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly

[L_Rahman]

Product development incentive structures.

Imagine you lead the product team at AWS.

- The team is reviewing what to build for the next quarter.

- You have a long list of revenue-generating features

- At the end of the list there's one more item that'll help your customers spend LESS money on your product.

- You can only build so many things and you know that you, your department, and Amazon the company will get pats on the back in $$$ form if you focus on the revenue generating features

- Sure, it'd be really good to help longterm customers understand their costs better, but your biggest ones have the resources to build that infrastructure themselves anyways.

And that is why this is so hard.

[claudenm]

I think you're absolutely right, but what's hilarious to me is that they have private pricing for many of their services. For the traffic we're already doing, we just asked and they knocked our cloudfront bill down nearly 75%. We didn't have to change our usage at all. Granted, we serve a lot of traffic.

[wahnfrieden]

What order of magnitude of traffic are we talking?

[doubleplusgood]

A couple of PB per week, I'd guess

[tonyedgecombe]

I'm pretty sure it's in Amazon's interest for its costs to be opaque.

[Cidan]

Second this. We just moved our sizable infrastructure to GCP for more or less the exact same reason. GCP makes all of this a breeze -- I don't understand why other providers can't do the same.

[brianwawok]

How much more would current customers pay for better billing dashboards?

How many customers quit amazon due to hard to read billing?

I suspect those are the two big questions to explain why this feature is lower on the priority radar...

[matt4077]

This way of looking at things has never been particularly convincing to me... Of all the work that's done, at any organisation, almost none of it can truly answer those questions affirmatively.

"That lightbulb is broken!"

"I was going to replace it, but I couldn't find a customer to pay for it, and nobody has threatened to change to a brighter competitor"

[brianwawok]

Have you ever founded a startup? Did you spend your time working on features users will pay for, or an awesome billing dashboard (assuming billing is not your core product of course?) If so, how successful were you?

It's about focus. Only so many hours in a day, so many dollars, so many developers. If AWS got a nicer billing daashboard but Lambda was delayed by 6 months, how would it have changed the place AWS has in the market?

Yes you could take this too far and never change a light bulb. But I would answer "I will be more productive if I have a nice light bulb, so it is worth the 5 minutes to change it"

[sjg007]

I'm sure amazon is working on it.

[jdubs]

They're letting their partners work on it.