[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.

[nemothekid]

AWS is being pushed on everyone the same way Hadoop was pushed on everyone in the 2010s and IBM in the 90s. Everyone sees themselves as webscale, when their data can reasonable fit in Excel. If the only product on AWS you are using in EC2 and S3, you are choosing the wrong tool.

The complexity of AWS is because a service like AWS is complex. Neither Azure or GCP has any less complexity. DigitalOcean offers way less services and as a result is way less complex.

>And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting

They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat. No company is going to have fidelity to serve a perfect product to every market. The frustration comes from the misplaced belief that a product should serve every kind of user in the market.

[Capricorn2481]

> They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat

I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you?

I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.

[nemothekid]

>I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you?

It's a metaphor. Your clients telling you they need you to deploy on AWS are the kind of people I believe are telling you to buy an F1 car to daily drive to whole foods. You said it yourself: "AWS is being pushed on everyone".

>I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.

Naturally. However, 99% of, what I believe are illegitimate complaints of AWS (AWS has tons of legitimate complaints), are from people who were probably better served by a using a simple VPS provider than a cloud provider. A VPS provider is simpler, easier to understand wrt to pricing, and cheaper. Most of the complexity in AWS comes from the fact that AWS itself is a very complex tool targeted to large organizations and deployments where people aren't using EC2 instances, or are using 100s of them. The complaint that the UI doesn't have enough affordances when trying to create a single EC2 instance is kind of ridiculous when you consider it's a tool designed for people launching 100s of instances. Nobody is reasonably launching 100 instances through the dashboard. Furthermore, if vendor lock-in is a concern you have AWS is the wrong tool.

Likewise for IAM. People complain a lot about IAM. But AWS has thousand different user types, and a 1000 different services. I've written my fair share of permission systems with a fraction of the amount of permutations. They always become complex due to the combinatorial nature. GCP manages to somehow be even worse. But you wouldn't need to deal with something like IAM if you just stuck with a VPS.

[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?