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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#231

Post by sam0x17 »

exhaze wrote: post #118
coder543 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS. > 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 whatev…

> If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console. No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough. > Again, this is a strawman. Thi…

If you're working with, say ML workloads, daily billing is laughably broad. Some workloads run for an hour or two, and cost a ton.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#232

Post by imglorp »

simlevesque wrote: post #210
imglorp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, in anger at last $work. It fit our usecase but it's definitely not for everyone. Happy to chat.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#233

Post by Spivak »

bt1a wrote: post #217
skrebbel wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right - it gives the illusion that you're 'getting an amazing deal and wow these people are great' when it reality you're probably getting gouged without the consulting and have to opt in for fair prices.

I mean it's a retention tactic at the company scale but for the individual consultant they're genuinely trying to help you out.

I frequent a local family-owned Italian restaurant/pizza place and my usual order jalapeños, banana peppers, and roasted garlic so I do a build you own. Totally fine, happy to pay the price. But one day I come in and the woman working the take-out counter sees my order before it goes in and tells me that if I order a "meat lovers", remove two toppings and sub the rest it comes out way cheaper.

So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in.

I don't think it's weird or nefarious that a business doesn't have completely consistent pricing and holding it differently can save you money. When we spec out services on AWS we're using the official calculator when deciding whether it's "worth it" so to us at least it genuinely feels like we're saving money.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#234

Post by ken »

skrebbel wrote: post #208
ken wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We were in no way one of "their biggest accounts". We were a couple guys in a cramped office over a mattress store, with a production service so small we could have run it from my old laptop. I guarantee it cost them at least 10x more to send those consultants over to us than we spent on AWS in a year, even before the optimizations they pointed out.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#235

Post by pathseeker »

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.

If this team shows up, it means you're spending so much money stupidly that they are afraid a competitor will easily steal you away with an offering for 10% of the cost. Their job is to come in and get you scaled back so another sales team can't get a foot in the door.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#236

Post by wilburlikesmith »

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.

Brilliantly well put. May I screenshot this to 9gag?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#237

Post by pathseeker »

moduspol wrote: post #185
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 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…

>I mean, they're operating this stuff at Internet scale and have never (AFAIK) raised prices

Prices should have gone down because they've continued to scale up and go into custom cooling/hardware/backbones/etc.

You're basically saying that you're cutting them slack because their margins have gotten much larger and they haven't decided to raise prices to make them even bigger.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#238

Post by jonahx »

rantwasp wrote: post #230
teej wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

go to: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ look up your service. each service has a 1 line description that captures what it does. eg Athena = query data in s3 using sql i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service. the name is the least of your worries.

> i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service.

Names matter.

When your first experience with a product is an opaque name or description, it usually tells you one of two things:

1. The people behind it are not good communicators. If so, this will likely show up in many of the other product details: APIs, documentation, complexity.

2. The people behind it deliberately chose to be opaque. Perhaps they want to make the product seem more important than it is. Perhaps they thought marketing jargon would help sales. Etc.

You seem to want to frame this in terms of developer laziness, but I don't think that's right. Both of these are often reliable signals. The criticism here is well-justified.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#239

Post by moduspol »

pathseeker wrote: post #237
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…

>I mean, they're operating this stuff at Internet scale and have never (AFAIK) raised prices Prices should have gone down because they've continued to scale up and go into custom cooling/hardware/backbones/etc. You're basically saying that you're cutting them slack because their margins have gotten much larger and they haven't decided to raise prices to make them even bigger.

Perhaps. All I meant was to show there's never been a time where they've had to acknowledge pricing something sufficiently badly that they had to go back and adjust prices up, perhaps after seeing how customers were using it.

The slack I'm giving is for the complexity in their billing, not in the price itself.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#240

Post by hinkley »

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?

Probably because parallelization is not the end-all-be-all of management strategies.

Consumers expect most companies to act like a coherent unit, (purportedly due to Dunbar's Number), and when you don't have enough oversight or leadership everything begins to look schizophrenic.

"Self-organizing" is organized chaos. If nobody picks winners at the end it never stops being organized chaos.

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