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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#281

Post by outworlder »

ashtonkem wrote: post #139
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.

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.

> The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

Well, there are whole organizations in my company dedicated to installation, procurement, provisioning, ordering(and tracking of said orders), of datacenter resources and hardware.

We are spoiled.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#284

Post by jeffasinger »

reificator wrote: post #249
Spivak wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in. I've seen that before, and I've also seen the opposite where people buy the veggie pizza and then add a meat or two on top to get a cheaper supreme pizza.

I did an online food ordering startup a ways back, and it was very surprising how few of the restaurant owners we talked to had clearly thought through pricing strategy for things like this.

We had originally gone in with clever ways for owners to describe how different changes would affect the price of an item, but ended up landing on just a giant matrix where they could input the end result price for any combination. The owners couldn't articulate their own pricing well enough to model it well.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#285

Post by rlt »

elchief wrote: post #253

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef V…

I'm not sure if the sarcastic tone is meant to imply AWS is just a rehash of existing tools, but that's obviously not the case.

A list of actual competing software/products/services would be pretty useful.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#286

Post by pdonis »

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.

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

Why should that make prices go down? Prices aren't based on cost. They're based on what the market will bear, i.e., what customers will pay. If you think AWS is too costly, you can go find some other solution. If enough customers start doing that that AWS's financial state suffers, AWS will have to rethink its price and cost structure.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#287

Post by joana035 »

rlt wrote: post #285
elchief wrote: post #253

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef V…

I'm not sure if the sarcastic tone is meant to imply AWS is just a rehash of existing tools, but that's obviously not the case. A list of actual competing software/products/services would be pretty useful.

Let that sink in

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#288

Post by rantwasp »

Uehreka wrote: post #251
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…

TIL what runs on port 53. I have never understood this name and I’ve been a professional software engineer for 8 years.

now you know. and hopefully route53 will ring a bell every time you hear it.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#289

Post by edaemon »

ashtonkem wrote: post #139
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.

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 always chuckled at the "AWS Simple Monthly Calculator": https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

It isn't simple at all! Not only is it complex and fairly daunting, you also need pretty deep knowledge of AWS to fill it out correctly. They eventually introduced an improved calculator that dropped the "simple" branding: https://calculator.aws/

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#290

Post by ecnahc515 »

jeffasinger wrote: post #284
reificator wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in. I've seen that before, and I've also seen the opposite where people buy the veggie pizza and then add a meat or two on top to get a cheaper supreme pizza.

I did an online food ordering startup a ways back, and it was very surprising how few of the restaurant owners we talked to had clearly thought through pricing strategy for things like this. We had originally gone in with clever ways for owners to describe how different changes would affect the price of an item, but ended up landing on just a giant matrix where they could input the end result price for any combinatio…

This is true even for enterprise sales. Hello "contact us for pricing"!
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