[thoraway1010]

The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.

So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.

I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.

Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.

So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.

[fragmede]

AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're definitely getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list pricing for EC2 instances.

Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?

[donor20]

I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that. What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not unreasonable

If you don't want to do that use savings plans.

If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts.

You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.