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AWS Control Tower

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21–30 of 51 posts

Re: AWS Control Tower

#21

Sorry but I've never felt that Amazon is completely operating in good faith with regards to allowing users to manage their costs. The proof of that is the fact that they still don't have a page where you can see the price of an ec2 instance alongside its stats. I've been wanting to see that for ten years and they still haven't added it.

In addition to the resources other commenters have listed, there's also the Price List API: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-price-list-api/

It provides both pricing and product information, so you can build your own dashboard/tooling if you want to.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#22
post #15

Sorry but I've never felt that Amazon is completely operating in good faith with regards to allowing users to manage their costs. The proof of that is the fact that they still don't have a page where you can see the price of an ec2 instance alongside its stats. I've been wanting to see that for ten years and they still haven't added it.

EC2 engineer here. Pricing is definitely a hard topic, and we can do more to make it easier. However, with regards to your second comment, are you looking for something more than this page [1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

The one obvious thing that's missing from that page is the network interface.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#23

I love that AWS is starting to care more about providing these services. For context, we have basically been building this for 2 years in our company internally to provide hundreds of “compliant by default” accounts. Every company seems to do it themselves. What I personally find very frustrating is the lack of being able to migrate any existing organisations into this. I’d love to get rid of some of our account prov…

I also worked on a team that built something similar, and I've seen it done in other companies. With services like this, and others like Transit Gateway, it's getting a lot easier to manage multiple accounts and VPCs. I haven't tried AWS Control Tower yet, but I am hoping it gives easy visibility into all the accounts in one place. With Amazon accounts, once you assume a role into an account, you can't see other accounts without switching back into them.

This is one area where I think GCP got it right. By using organizations and projects within one account instead of having parent and child accounts, it's quite a bit easier to see what's going on. And a parent account has a very different role from child accounts, so it makes sense to treat them as separate things.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#24
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the billing dashboard not cover your needs? With their billing query UI you can slice your billing data by region, service, etc.

The billing API tells you about resources that have charged you, whereas I think the parent comment is talking about resources that are either “active” in some sense where they will charge you at some point in the future for the usage you’re accruing (but where this usage isn’t metered in a way visible to the billing API until it “commits” somehow); or, worse, resources which are “exposed” in some sense where they co…

They do only show what you have been charged, but to my knowledge this is update very regularly. It seems at least next day.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#25
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You want help with a problem in your staging account? pay for support, you want help with your production? oh sorry, you have to pay again. In a sense this is a good thing since support is percentage based and you may want a higher level for support for production than staging.

You should have the option to pay for the aggregate and get support across all the accounts, it only makes sense, really.

If I recall correctly, that only happens at the Enterprise support tier.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#26

I'd love it if at a glance I could see all of the AWS resources that I am using that cost me money, across all the regions. Right now I feel like I would have to poke into every menu option in every region across the entire set of AWS services to find out exactly what I'm using. The cynic in me wonders if this is not a priority for AWS because they make so much money from forgotten and hard to find resources that are…

This.

This is one thing that GCP has done so brilliantly right - the projects structure. From an organisation point of view, this is the most seamless way of managing billing+access , instead of mucking about ARN crap.

It's puzzling that AWS has still not been able to roll this out. What's so hard ? roll out projects and put all existing customers in a default project.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#27

I'd love it if at a glance I could see all of the AWS resources that I am using that cost me money, across all the regions. Right now I feel like I would have to poke into every menu option in every region across the entire set of AWS services to find out exactly what I'm using. The cynic in me wonders if this is not a priority for AWS because they make so much money from forgotten and hard to find resources that are…

It’s not in Amazon’s interest to make billing easy to understand

This isn't really true. Billing opacity scares off small clients (it's one of the biggest reasons that, as a consultant, my clients leaned away from AWS) and can make larger clients consider diversification or divestiture.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#28
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You want help with a problem in your staging account? pay for support, you want help with your production? oh sorry, you have to pay again. In a sense this is a good thing since support is percentage based and you may want a higher level for support for production than staging.

You should have the option to pay for the aggregate and get support across all the accounts, it only makes sense, really.

You do have that option at the Enterprise level (and since there is no cost curve at the Basic or Developer level, it would be meaningless there, so Business is the only level that lacks the option but would make it meaningful.)

Re: AWS Control Tower

#29
post #7

AWS is pushing Organizations/Accounts as something like GCP's Projects and it mostly works, cross account iam works pretty good, so does many other services but sadly this is not reflected in the support subscriptions. You want help with a problem in your staging account? pay for support, fair enough. You want help with your production? oh sorry, you have to pay again.

This is like most other AWS products that end up being an automated bunch of scripts that wire up functionality for you rather than being a full-fledged product.

GCP organizations, folders, projects, and IAM system is far better than anything in AWS or Azure.

Re: AWS Control Tower

#30
Just tried it on our master account:

> You tried to use an account that is a member of an organization in AWS Organizations. To set up your AWS Control Tower landing zone, use an account that is not a member of an organization.

Looks like it’s only feasible if you’re starting from scratch.

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