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by torginus 42 days ago
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.
2 comments
rowanG077 42 days ago
A core part of an engineers job is including thinking about cost in what they do.
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loloquwowndueo 41 days ago
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.
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torginus 41 days ago
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.
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rowanG077 41 days ago
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.
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decimalenough 41 days ago
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.

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loloquwowndueo 41 days ago
Just noticed you did say computer science, not computer engineering. Two very different things.
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loloquwowndueo 42 days ago
Engineers are not entirely cost-oblivious entities.
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aurareturn 42 days ago
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.
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loloquwowndueo 41 days ago
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

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