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by jdc0589 3316 days ago
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.
2 comments
imron 3316 days ago
> 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.

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j_s 3316 days ago
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.

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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...

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deno 3316 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
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L_Rahman 3316 days ago
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.

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claudenm 3315 days ago
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.
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wahnfrieden 3315 days ago
What order of magnitude of traffic are we talking?
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doubleplusgood 3315 days ago
A couple of PB per week, I'd guess
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