[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.

[cyberax]

> 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

This is the "Comparison Table" from the EC2 launch wizard: https://imgur.com/a/YjFhkzb

The pricing is right there, along with filtering and sorting.

[Capricorn2481]

For the record, my original complaint that ec2 did not have pricing in the dropdown seems to be untrue right now, which is great! For the sake of UX discussion, I want to talk about your picture as if that were the only way to get this info. So let me explain why that's bad.

The main reason is this is only true for ec2 and every other resource has its own slightly different way of getting the cost, making it really easy to miss things like this. But here are the steps we take to get to your image.

- First you click compare instance types, and you're brought to a completely different page with a table.

- By default, there is no column for pricing, but two columns for "storage space" even though most of the instance types have these blank.

- There's nothing that says you can add columns to this page. You eventually figure out it's the gear icon.

- Then you click the gear on the top right to look at column names. You try searching the 44 column names for "price" or "cost" but both of those turn up blank, because there's no fuzzy searching.

- So rather than use the search box, you manually scroll through all 44 column names and find pricing at the bottom of the list.

This is the definition of out of the way. It's hard to imagine why you would default to showing two different storage columns over the pricing column, when half the instances are blank on storage.

Now do FSx, which has no pricing information at all, or any links to pricing information. They have an info tab telling you your backups are incremental, which would make you think they are fairly inexpensive. Not more expensive than the filesystem itself!

[cyberax]

This is simply because AWS UI is not made by one team. Each individual team makes their own UI/UX decisions, and things like pricing info just get forgotten and/or scheduled "for later".

So they just added a default table widget, and they didn't even bother with customizing it. You can enable the context menu for the table's rows, which works and is empty.

I worked at AWS around 6 years ago, and we had a great win with just getting access to a service that provided the full list of available instance types and base prices.

This kind of disjointness is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that individual services stay within reasonable complexity, and usually all the functionality is available through the public APIs because the UI console is just another consumer of these APIs. AWS is also very careful with permissions, internal services try to avoid escalating privileges and try to perform everything using the user-visible access policies.

But it's bad because integration just sucks, and the UI layer is the ultimate example of this. AWS console _is_ really messy.

[cyberax]

And to add to this: AWS teams were also quite focused on avoiding surprise bills for customers. Because surprise bills led to customer support interactions, Sev2/3 tickets that needed investigation, etc.