[aljgz]

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 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 had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.

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.

Created a DigitalOcean account, moved everything over. Set up our CI/CDs to deploy there, and spent the next two months on the product, launching one month earlier than promised.

Some years before that I saw a video online where a person digs a hole near a river and puts a pipe connecting the river and the hole. The fishes push themselves hard in the pipe to get to their trap. Choosing the path of least resistance, and never backing off from a mistake: recipes to end up like those fishes. The video left a big impression on me.

[clickety_clack]

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]

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.

[aurareturn]

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

[grogenaut]

I get why it's like this.

Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console.

When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set it via AI into a cdk construct. Usually pick a relatively normal machine type digging through all the ilvarious enterprise discounts (which are not reflectedin the prices in the console). Then as I roll out or when I get resource limit alarms on the fleet I adjust the instance types. Or when accounting asks me about price. In those cases I usually look if it's worth it to optimize.

The enterprise discounts are a big consideration. Every year new hires make bad decisions because they don't know about the discounts. They wildly affect total cost. Some things are more expensive (lambda first few years), and others are very cheap so we dog food. The console price in no way reflects reality.

In 15 years we've had about 1k services stood up, around 700 are active. 2000 or total counting tutorials and tests. That means out of an eng org of 500, we've made those decisions maybe 10k times total.

That's how Amazon thinks about it as well. So yeah I agree that the UI isn't meant to be like one where your spinning up a host. I haven't spun up a single host in like 5 years, but I've made many clusters.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be better to work for a wider audience. Customer obsession and all

[temp8830]

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]

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.

[geoduck14]

Wow. Your story sounds like my company. Makes me feel less bad for the dysfunction I have to work with

[sithadmin]

That's not just AWS. That's Amazon generally. All Amazon orgs I've worked for have been like this, and due to the nature of my work, I (and my teams) have been treated like pariahs for daring to suggest that there ought to be even a minimal amount collaboration, shared standards, and cross-pollination on ideas between teams.

[someguyiguess]

Conways Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[whazor]

AWS UX is bad because there are too many products and features, but also still supported legacy.

[voncheese]

> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.

This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession.

That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon sucks overall, not just for pricing/packaging but even getting basic shit done. So perhaps Amazon (or at least AWS) doesn't think a good UX is a key ingredient to demonstrating Customer Obsession.

[aurareturn]

Maybe their customer obsession culture did not extend to their AWS department?

AWS services names are notoriously bad at communicating what they actually do: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

[gbear605]

Everywhere on Amazon.com has bad UI/UX. For one example, the flow on checking out as a non-Prime member (not sure about Prime members) is janky and feels straight out of 2005. Like it reloads the page, taking ten+ seconds, every time you enter new data (address, credit card, personal info, etc.). I would be laughed out of the room if I tried to deliver this at work, but Amazon delivers it for millions of people.

So no, they care zero about their customers, except maybe for getting as much money as possible out of it.

[hvb2]

Just saying, you can be customer obsessed and still not have a good feel for UX...

Ask me how I know

[DANmode]

Are you describing you?!

[torginus]

Personally I think the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.

Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right?

So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no.

Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - configuring all that stuff on the UI, and getting it right is torture.

[rowanG077]

A core part of an engineers job is including thinking about cost in what they do.

[loloquwowndueo]

Right - nobody who’s had a formal education in engineering would think that way, because cost considerations are part of the curriculum from the start.

[torginus]

I don't think a lot of formal education places teach AWS's resource pricing structure, which can be incredibly confusing, but can be boiled down to: if you want to be as cheap as possible, just use EC2 for everything and maybe S3 for storage.

[rowanG077]

I'm very surprised you expect any formal education to teach any specific pricing structure. You teach how to evaluate solutions for their price impact. No one was claiming any curriculum includes AWS's resource pricing structure.

[decimalenough]

I can't recall cost ever coming up as a consideration during my years of formal computer science studies in school. Big-O efficiency, sure, but the cost of compute, storage, bandwidth, nope, not once.

It was absolutely hammered into me in the years of working for startups that followed, though.

[loloquwowndueo]

Just noticed you did say computer science, not computer engineering. Two very different things.

[loloquwowndueo]

Engineers are not entirely cost-oblivious entities.

[aurareturn]

They're not but if they don't talk to the pricing team, and most devs don't want to talk to business people, they'd never coordinate on where it makes sense to show pricing to customers.

[loloquwowndueo]

You didn’t read the comment I replied to, did you? The premise was :

> the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.

So this is about the engineers consuming AWS, not the ones who designed and implemented AWS

[epistasis]

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.

[m463]

> Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX.

I think the problem is that nobody understands the size of the problem.

For most tasks, the accomplishment is getting something to work. That takes 90% of the time. But the UI requires polish, working things out, backing out and trying again, and takes the OTHER 90% of the time.

I remember talking to a friend who worked with apple to port some dvd authoring software. And steve jobs started with the UI, and said "this is what you do". I think it was just a blank screen and you drag your video onto it. the software they were porting was a bunch of windows type confusing nonsense, and they had big changes to make.

That said, AWS might be a dark pattern. Remember the cable companies that didn't WANT to show the hidden fees? because $29.99 a month was really $71.41?

[jonhohle]

Prior to AWS at Amazon hosts were provisioned as “host classes” and typically operated on in that way. We were encouraged to make them “touchless”, which meant the infrastructure team could replace that host without contacting the team first. The deployment tool deployed to host classes (though you could put an individual server there if you wanted). EC2 wasn’t quite the same, but not very foreign either. We didn’t originally even use the AWS interface (at the team level). They were managed by a team working on the transition.

[ricardobayes]

It just goes to show if you are the first big player in a space, you can have whatever UX. No UX will override that first mover advantage. I could cite countless examples, where the first commonly known company rules the space and no newcomer with a flashy UX can come close, no matter how hard they try.

[Y-bar]

Judging by how much things jump around on the screen when I navigate from one view to another I agree.

[pokot0]

Honestly UX became irrelevant in the last years (infra as code) and even more in the last year (coding agents). What you need is well structured API and a CLI that does not limit you. You can call it UX if you want, but the skillset is different.

When I started my latest project my first rule was: I never have to login to AWS console. I didn’t achieve ‘never’ but I am pretty close and the experience is a lot better

[ransom1538]

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?

[ivan_gammel]

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.

[parliament32]

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]

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_ar...

[bdangubic]

It should 100% be fireable offense if you have a choice

[andreashaerter]

> 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]

Regardless of whether the metaphor stands up, this is a horrible thing to say. Abuse victims are not responsible for the abuse they receive.

[mrmanner]

I had the same thought at first, but in context I think the quoted text refers to business relationships. Which makes all the difference.

[reactordev]

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.

[parliament32]

Azure is a compliance requirement for us.

Haven't had anything impacting in GovCloud, but if you're not there yet I'm sure there's shenanigans in the consumer version.

[e40]

You’ve got to be kidding. Azure is 10x the dumpster fire that AWS is. I have used both.

[DANmode]

They didn’t comment on the entirety, just the billing transparency.

[Lucasoato]

> 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.

[whateverboat]

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.

[bulletsvshumans]

They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.

[mlhpdx]

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]

> Which price should it show?

"Estimated cost per 1000 invocations"

[lr1970]

> 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.

[finaard]

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.

[evilduck]

> 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.

[lambda]

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]

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]

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.

[sudosteph]

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]

> 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]

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.

[richwater]

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]

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]

Pedantry: You’re having a smooth UX (or DX) by not using the UI.

[swasheck]

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/) now. their api is functional and reasonable.

[okeuro49]

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]

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.

[chuckadams]

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.

[mips_avatar]

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.

[hypeatei]

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.

[wodenokoto]

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.

[tcp_handshaker]

>> 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...

[dekhn]

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.

[nullstyle]

Not back when i was using AWS

[Capricorn2481]

You can upload an image to imgur and show us. I don't see this.

[cyberax]

> 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.

[zsoltkacsandi]

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]

If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.

[whs]

I think AWS billing is quite complicated that they probably don't even know what did you get charged specifically for this machine.

You might have leftover reserve instance that applies, which make the listed price inaccurate. That reservation might even be in a different AWS account in the same organization that you don't have access to. That reservation might not even be there between the time you quote and the time you actually launch it if someone/something did launch before you.

Your organization might also have discounts. I believe some discount may also be very confidential. For example, my reseller policy is that the customer must not be able to see AWS Billing in the organization root account as supposedly the price in that console are the price AWS charged the reseller, while we pay listed price minus any discount we negotiated ourselves.

Finally, I suppose they don't want to have prices shown in multiple places as they will need to update it when prices changes. Doesn't want to risk forgetting one place and getting sued for it. You can see that AWS documentations often do not want to mention the price at all, even if that price is currently free.

Chinese clouds kinda make this simple by making reservation part of the buying machine itself - you have to mark that particular machine as monthly/yearly committed when you start it (or convert it later). The complicated part is recycling instances - if you delete a server before its reservation ends it ends up in a recycle bin that you need to look before making new reservations.

[zsoltkacsandi]

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.

[eptcyka]

Give me a slider for bandwidth used or a formula where the variables are abstracted away. If a computer can tell me how much I owe, a computer can be made to show how it came to it’s conclusion.

[sillyfluke]

Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.

[simondotau]

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.

[nostrebored]

How many real applications actually want this behavior? AWS is not built around hobbyist needs. It’s built around being a platform to run most shapes of production use cases.

[sillyfluke]

This has been a feature request since AWS was a thing.

>AWS is not built around hobbyist needs

Yes, as if no startup teams are tasked to remain within hard spending targets when they're trying to build a POC with technologies that they are not initially experts in.

[pixl97]

I mean, by the number of people that end up with 100,000 charges in a few hours posting on HN, I'd say a lot more than you're giving it credit for.

[Capricorn2481]

I don't think companies want their bill run up either.

[zsoltkacsandi]

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.

[zsoltkacsandi]

Interesting to see that some people assumed there are no kill-switch mechanism, and when it turns out they just did not know about it, the (totally valid and factful) comment gets downvoted because it is against their initial assumption. Not what I would have expected on a professional forum.

[mikeyouse]

Sure, but providing estimated costs based on reasonable pricing buckets alongside the options to add the new machine is something that every other vendor manages to do..

[timr]

...and AWS does it too. I can go right into an account and see an estimated cost per hour, and even pre-pay at a fixed discount for longer terms if I want to. They tell me right there what it will cost. They do this for everything that is reasonably a "fixed cost", like CPU time.

They cannot predict what my bandwidth consumption will be, or other such variable costs. For those, they tell you rates.

[Capricorn2481]

No it's pretty bad. They show you the cost after all the resources are set up. Even setting up an ec2 instance, a really basic use case that has a fixed cost based on size, you have to go Google it and find their ec2 pricing table. It would take no space to just put the price per hour in the drop-down as you're picking an instance. But no, they obscure it on purpose.

That's just for ec2. Everything is like this. Super awesome when you're being brought onto a new project and trying to estimate costs for your client. And let's not forget the little tiny things that should cost nothing. A NAT gateway with no redundancy is $30/mo. That's a fun surprise.

[tomrod]

Price simulators are fine. They also know the distribution of use. They can do cost plus pricing (many cloud providers do). You're defending deliberately obfuscated pricing when it need not be obfuscated.

[zsoltkacsandi]

> Price simulators are fine.

Yes, as long as you do not have seasonal traffic, auto-scaling, spot instances, burstable instances, saving plans, reserved instances, floor/custom pricing, etc. These are tools to optimize your spendings and spend less if you know what you are doing.

> defending deliberately obfuscated pricing

A bit contradictory that price simulators are fine, but then the pricing is deliberately obfuscated. Then which one?

[mlhpdx]

As I read through these comments I’m thinking about the dynamic range of AWS customers: from my little hobby account to my business account to some hyper-scaler’s account.

I think about the diversity in usage patterns: from generating giant video stream broadcast somebody trying to calculate yet another digit of pi. It’s wild.

Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before). Too many variable.

If only there were some kind of software with a text based, natural language interface that we could ask a question like “how much would it cost to do XYNZ on AWS?”

[windexh8er]

I don't think your comment hits like you think it does. I think your intent with "cheap" implies some level of being lesser. In my experience that is not the reality. Similar to opp I migrated a startup from 5x cost in AWS to DO years ago. In fact that "cheap" competitor was able to give them better performance, more reliability and more features for a lot less.

AWS is almost never required and almost never the best option. It's the Cisco of options, it's often the default but for no good reason other than someone on the team probably knows enough about AWS to make it work.

Almost every startup I've worked at has leveraged AWS as their primary but when not they end up using AWS for something. And in every startup there's always contention with AWS spend and all of these startups invest significant time and, funny enough money (via cost savings products or consulting), to reduce their AWS bill. And yet, they never seem to try anything else. Doomed to the cyclical cost savings cycle. Amazon knows this and the UI/UX is designed to keep companies in this money burning loop.

Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].

[0] https://mashable.com/article/amazon-web-services-outage-may-...

[RulerOf]

> Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].

I probably should have commented on the original article here, but I pulled all of my company's production infra out of that AZ back in 2019 because AWS dragged its feet for too long deploying 5th gen hardware there.

I assumed the racks were full or something. I still don't know if they ever did get newer hardware in that AZ—I just avoid it like the plague.

I had a light chuckle this week when I discovered the work I did out of sheer frustration saved us from a partial outage seven years later.

[callmeal]

>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.

On Google cloud compute, the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine.

[aljgz]

Not showing the price was not "my problem". It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user.

No thank you

[zsoltkacsandi]

> It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user.

I spent 5 years optimizing spendings on AWS at various companies. Yes, it does come with traps and footguns. On the other hand if you know what are you doing, there are plenty of tools to optimize your spendings with RIs, saving plans, auto-scaling, etc, and spend less than the list prices.

Based on my experience AWS for the companies that can afford to pay surprise bills out of pocket if something goes wrong.

[epistasis]

Everything you describe is reinforcing the point of the person you are responding to.

[zsoltkacsandi]

Yes, and exactly that is why I started my first comment with this: "I agree with you at some degree".

I agree with him/her, just shared my more nuanced take, based on my experience coming from my past workplaces.

[mlhpdx]

I’m not sure I understand. AWS has detailed pricing information for each service.

I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.

[Capricorn2481]

In completely unrelated pages to where you setup resources, yes. Ec2 pricing is in a random doc disconnected from the AWS console.

They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.

[nemothekid]

Respectfully, I think this is more of a use case where you aren't the target audience for a service like AWS.

I've been working with AWS for nearly 10 years. Many people I know, both small and large, just don't even use the console. If I need to figure out how much a project costs I use the AWS pricing calculator. Having an ec2 pricing on the pricing page is meaningless once you spend any meaningful amount of time in AWS. Once you add discounts and reserved instances, that number is going to be inaccurate anyways.

If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge.

[Capricorn2481]

I'm a contractor, so my deployment complexity is whatever my current client's complexity is.

> If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge

That's fine if you feel that way. The article and following discussion is clearly about the smaller audience, and I think you're underestimating how far up these little problems stack and scale. If a couple grand is a rounding error to you, that's great. Most businesses fall firmly in the place where that would be a problem.

I think there is a value add for large companies on AWS, but for smaller ones, I don't particularly feel like AWS is an F1 car, more like a self driving Tesla that locks you inside when it's on fire. And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting. AWS is being pushed on everyone.

[Capricorn2481]

Replying to myself, this is not true anymore, for ec2 at least. I think that my comment was upvoted so much really speaks to how chaotic and inconsistent the UI is, because you get a totally different experience using other services.

For instance, I don't see any pricing information when setting up an FSx filesystem, even for the size you setup. And there's definitely nothing saying backups will cost you more than storage (even though they are incremental?)

[mlhpdx]

Not unrelated pages. All AWS pricing is and has been for a very long time posted on predictable pages alongside the service marketing and documentation. The console is the console. I, for one, don’t want to see pricing in the console or in cloudformation or CDK documentation — because if in one then in all, right?

[fragmede]

> I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.

Okay but 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.

[b40d-48b2-979e]

    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.

[DANmode]

> [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]

"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.

[DANmode]

> The abuse is definitely NOT the victim's fault, it's 100% the fault of the abuser.

At some stage, (regardless of law or what’s right), standing in a pedestrian-crossing on a busy thoroughfare is foolish.

Keep hanging out in the crosswalk hoping Bezos will stop for you,

if you want,

but don’t chastise those warning others to move.

[rmunn]

Did you see the P.S. I edited in? I'm not taking objection to "hey, you should move" (or "hey, you probably shouldn't park there if you don't want your car windows smahsed"). It's the specific "it's your fault" phrasing I'm objecting to. It would have been better phrased as "remember, everything that happens afterwards is something you could have avoided". The line can be fuzzy sometimes, and I've definitely seen people throwing around accusations of victim-blaming where such accusations are unwarranted (someone saying "hey, if you're a woman, you'd be wise not to hang out in such-and-such a neighborhood alone after dark" is definitely trying to give advice, not victim-blame, but I've seen something phrased in nearly exactly those terms — I don't recall them verbatim — get unfairly accused of victim-blaming). So I agree with you in many cases. This specific one, though, was phrased as "it's your fault" and I can't agree with that phrasing. It's still the abuser's fault, even if the victim didn't take action to get out of the situation.

But yes, people in abusive relationships (whether in their personal or professional lives) should be advised to get out of there, and should be helped to do so as best as you can. No qualms with that.

[lukan]

If the victim had the option to walk, but did not, then it is his fault for not doing that.

If I know a dog is dangerous, but try to touch it anyway and get bitten - then yes the evil dog bit me, but it was my fault for not reacting to danger. Same way with a abusive company, if you know they are, but still make a contract because it seems convenient, then it is still a abusive company, but your fault for getting into a relationship with them.