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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#201

Post by scarface74 »

StreamBright wrote: post #110
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…

If the AWS tools fail to provide you this information than you can just tag everything (we use scope, stage, service, region, owner tags, example: global, dev, hadoop, eu-west-1, data-engineering) and it is trivial to generate a cost report where you can drill down by environments, teams, services, etc.

Exactly,

I’m often fielding questions over on r/aws about how to do X on AWS where X is something simple. I then ask are they trying to solve problem X or are they trying to learn AWS. If it is the former, just use LightSail. Outside of serverless applications, I wouldn’t want the complications of full fledge AWS for a small project and I get paid to know the ins and outs of it.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#202

Post by unethical_ban »

scarface74 wrote: post #164
unethical_ban wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm training on AWS and part of an AWS infra team - but we use Terraform partially because we intend to have production support at our company for all three big US clouds, and want the IaC layer to be uniform. I get that there are times to dive all the way in, but there is still a part of me that says "Is this what the Internet is now?"

You have looked at the provisioners for the different providers haven’t you? Terraform in no way provides you an abstraction layer over the different cloud providers.

Learning terraform for the various providers = learning the different syntaxes and design philosophies of different python libraries.

Learning the different IaC tools for each provider = Learning Python, Javascript, and PHP.

Also, Terraform does state management and can be used to package deployments of apps to different platforms. Our IaC pipeline uses Terraform to deploy resources to AWS and several other cloud toolsets, all in one language.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#203

Post by scarface74 »

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 literally just search on Google “How do I find the price per s3 bucket” and the first link is this.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/s3-fi...

Why do people think that they can give Amazon a credit card number and expect everything to be easy enough for them and suitable for a large enterprise? AWS offers something for beginners - Lightsail. When that outgrows their needs, they can peer their behind the scenes LightSail VPC to a full fledge VPC.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#204

Post by inlined »

joosters wrote: post #197
moduspol wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually try to cut them some slack. I mean, they're operating this stuff at Internet scale and have never (AFAIK) raised prices. They've basically got two options: * Price things in an intricate way sufficiently specific to actual costs of providing the service for many use cases * Price things more generally in a way that more or less probably results in about the same revenue The problem with option #2 is that it…

Doesn't that kind of problem get easier at large scale? It's like any time you have a limited resource to share out. e.g. if an ISP has 150mbits of connectivity, it would be difficult to provide a '100mbit' service to two homes - one busy user will clearly hit the other. But if you have 1500mbits to share out to 20 homes, the service will seem much better. As you scale up, it becomes easier to provision less per cust…

Economy of scale is different when you’re providing a cloud business because your costs (and hopefully revenue) are dominated by the head customers. Imagine a company whose business model isn’t profitable for AWS becomes the next Dropbox. Suddenly the tail can’t subsidize the head. And even if it could, the business is shot.

You always need the head to subsidize the tail (e.g. free trials). You can’t let the head become unprofitable.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#205

Post by teej »

rantwasp wrote: post #195
RedShift1 wrote: post #136

This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked away from Amazon products because I could barely make out what it really was and if I could use it for the application at hand. Many thanks!

nowhere close to 100x. actually it’s worse than the aws names across the board. the names have a logic to them but I agree it’s intimidating to learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don’t. you learn the bits and pieces you need. for example: EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic. S3 is Simple Storage Service. It’s a Service for Stori…

Cognito? Lightsail? Redshift? CodeStar? Athena? Polly?

There are loads of AWS services that don’t follow any logic, they’re just distinct, easy to spell nouns.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#206

Post by balls187 »

exhaze wrote: post #90
coder543 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bre…

> sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises.

Amazon, in my experience, has issued organizations a one-time credit in cases of surprise bills.

The bigger crux of the issue, is Amazon has democratized CapEx into OpEx, and it's too easy to be ignorant of the details of infrastructure planning, which is rolled into AWS pricing.

Before AWS, IT teams had to plan for and estimate costs prior to procuring hardware. This is no longer needed with ondemand, programmatic infrastructure.

Engineers, who (reductively) focus on solving business problems with code, aren't necessarily thinking about the costs of deploying their solutions, the way Ops and IT would be.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#207

Post by hagsh »

Although AWS Braket is just in preview it's pretty safe to say it is a Quantum Computer as a Service bundled with a framework to write you algorithm in (a la IBM Q and qiskit). The nice thing about it is that you have a choice between three hardware vendor, all featuring different architectures giving the ability to test superconducting, ion trap and annealing systems from the same place.

I have no affiliation with this other than being a Physics/CS graduate with only one Quantum Computing course under my belt.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#208

Post by skrebbel »

ken wrote: post #176
ashtonkem wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging. The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

I'm as anti-AMZN/AWS as anyone these days, but to their credit, Amazon has their own teams of consultants who will come to your business for free to analyze your usage of AWS and tell you how to save money. They openly joked about how it was their job to get customers to spend less money with their company.

That's not openly joking, it's sales.

If you feel like you're way overpaying for AWS, you're much likelier to look out for alternatives. So if they help their biggest accounts save some money, it'll net them way more in the long run.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#209

Post by notatoad »

teej wrote: post #205
rantwasp wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nowhere close to 100x. actually it’s worse than the aws names across the board. the names have a logic to them but I agree it’s intimidating to learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don’t. you learn the bits and pieces you need. for example: EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic. S3 is Simple Storage Service. It’s a Service for Stori…

Cognito? Lightsail? Redshift? CodeStar? Athena? Polly? There are loads of AWS services that don’t follow any logic, they’re just distinct, easy to spell nouns.

which i really appreciate when it comes to googling them for help with stuff. i can google "aws lightsail" and get results directly relating to what i'm looking for. have you ever tried to sift through the mess of seo marketing crap that comes back when your search term includes "VPS"?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#210

Post by simlevesque »

imglorp wrote: post #20
speedgoose wrote: post #12

I see that AWS IoT Greengrass is missing. https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ I may be wrong but from what I understood, it's more or less a way to manage AWS Lambda functions (cgi-bin scripts), Docker, and a MQTT client connected to AWS on your GNU/Linux devices (raspbian on a raspberry pi for example, or a x86 pc). However you still need Ansible or similar to manage the device so the actual value is kinda low becaus…

Close, greengrass is about pushing real aws lambas down to intermediate site gateways (with certs and crypto and management), and then you can have very lightweight clients with almost no brain talk to that thing. My blurb would read, "vendor locked lambdas at the edge to proxy IoT widgets".

Do you use Greengrass ? I think not many people do but I really like it.
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