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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#81

Post by exhaze »

mherrmann wrote: post #66
exhaze wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally called "Billing" and the "Cost Explorer" is the first item in the navigation when you go to the page. I've attached a screenshot and highlighted it for you. FYI, this month is the first time I've opened the AWS GUI in 4-5 months, and it took me about a minute to find the billing page and drill into our AWS costs. I've provided an image that shows how to get to the cost explorer from "Billing" (you can…

This does not show the costs per bucket . Specifically, I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain this information.

You're right, it's shitty of them to not provide that out of the box. However, if it's such a big problem for you, as others have pointed out, it's easy to solve. If you are paying $500/month for S3, you must be processing quite a large amount of data - as another poster pointed out, there's an easy to fix it. If you weren't going to use S3 for this, what would you use instead for this use-case?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#82

Post by gonzo41 »

davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

You're totally right.

I look at the whole stack and aside from IAM and EC2, and ECS I think you could get by without a lot of those products.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#83

Post by karatestomp »

wegs wrote: post #8
superasn wrote: post #4

This can be a good cheat-sheet and no wonder there have been so many attempts at this(1). Maybe we're better off making this as github page where users can send pull requests and add/rewrite to these. (1) https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ (2) https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

I'd prefer to see this integrated into the AWS UX. For an external crowd-sourced version, I'd like to see something like this with a column for maturity, and whether it actually works. The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards letting…

> The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards letting me know what I should and shouldn't use.

I’d like that and also the same thing for languages supported by various services and SDKs, which are sometimes supported and sometimes “supported”.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#84

Post by callamdelaney »

drcongo wrote: post #50

It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember w…

I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged into another account on the same browser and it had the same pins as my other account, without me setting them.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#85

Post by mherrmann »

exhaze wrote: post #81
mherrmann wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not show the costs per bucket . Specifically, I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain this information.

You're right, it's shitty of them to not provide that out of the box. However, if it's such a big problem for you, as others have pointed out, it's easy to solve. If you are paying $500/month for S3, you must be processing quite a large amount of data - as another poster pointed out, there's an easy to fix it. If you weren't going to use S3 for this, what would you use instead for this use-case?

I look forward to migrating to Linode's S3-compatible object storage. I appreciate that you are agreeing that it's shitty of AWS. But I disagree that it's "easy to solve". Like I said, I already spent quite some time looking into how to solve it. And having to set up logging for a bucket (and learning how to do this in AWS's complex interface), and if I understand correctly creating another bucket to receive those logs, and learning how to then obtain and interpret the results? Maybe you're above my paygrade but I do not consider this easy.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#86

Post by castlecrasher2 »

s_dev wrote: post #31

Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?

>Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?

Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping me remember which service does what.

S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I don't do a whole lot with VMs in my role but it takes me a few good seconds to remember "GCE" whereas EC2 is instantly memorable. Don't get me started on Google's many "Data X" services (Datastore, Dataproc, Data Transfer, Data Catalog, Data Fusion, Dataprep, Data Labeling).

tl,dr; the lizard part of my brain very much prefers AWS' naming style, and I have a hard time remembering GCP's services despite the descriptive naming.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#87

Post by scarface74 »

drcongo wrote: post #50

It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember w…

Think of LightSail as being more akin to Linode or Digital Ocean a simple straight forward VPS without having to setup a VPC and being bombarded with trying to navigate 150 services. It’s also straight forward pricing.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#88

Post by nolok »

exhaze wrote: post #68
rumanator wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user with information with enough clarity to allow him to form accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs, and what is the implication in cost of applying some change. Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS serv…

> Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. Did you actually look at the billing page? Here's a screenshot of my billing page: https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY It meticulously breaks out per-service costs across whatever dimension you want. "EC2-Other" is rolled up in the chart, but it's broken out by each individual item further down…

You're absolutely right, and also absolutely missing his point. As a massive user of AWS for a long time, yes you can know exactly to the sub-detail line what you pay for, no you can absolutely not have an overview or good estimation of mapping what a change in your software stack / setup will cost or save you. Unless we're talking "remove an entire service" and then duh, yeah.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#89

Post by scarface74 »

Frost1x wrote: post #23
imglorp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> integrated into the AWS UX Sure, it should be right in the headline of the service's "about" page. The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. If people are reading your "about" page and nobody understands what the hell your thing does, maybe your marketing, faux-tech, word salad is pointless.

>The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. Is it a UX problem or is it intentional deep branding to further promote vendor lock-in? This is one reason I've been opposed to AWS since the early phases--I don't want to learn all of their stupid branded vendor-specific nomenclature.

If you are any sort of real business, you already “locked in” to more than likely a dozen or more third party services. I worked at a company whose entire workflow was tightly integrated into Workday via APIs, not to mention SalesForce.

If you have ever worked in healthcare, the level of “lock-in” that they have to their EHR/EMR and various other third party services. would make you cry.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#90

Post by exhaze »

coder543 wrote: post #72
exhaze wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. Did you actually look at the billing page? Here's a screenshot of my billing page: https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY It meticulously breaks out per-service costs across whatever dimension you want. "EC2-Other" is rolled up in the chart, but it's broken out by each individual item further down…

Isn’t that exactly what the person you replied to said? You’re showing what you’ve been charged for previously. That part works, at a certain level of detail. That doesn’t show what you are being charged for right now , nor does it help you predict what your total costs will be at the end of the month.

You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises.

Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily breakdown of your costs.

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