Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…
Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow. I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. It looked horrible. Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are ho…
Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console.
When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set it via AI into a cdk construct. Usually pick a relatively normal machine type digging through all the ilvarious enterprise discounts (which are not reflectedin the prices in the console). Then as I roll out or when I get resource limit alarms on the fleet I adjust the instance types. Or when accounting asks me about price. In those cases I usually look if it's worth it to optimize.
The enterprise discounts are a big consideration. Every year new hires make bad decisions because they don't know about the discounts. They wildly affect total cost. Some things are more expensive (lambda first few years), and others are very cheap so we dog food. The console price in no way reflects reality.
In 15 years we've had about 1k services stood up, around 700 are active. 2000 or total counting tutorials and tests. That means out of an eng org of 500, we've made those decisions maybe 10k times total.
That's how Amazon thinks about it as well. So yeah I agree that the UI isn't meant to be like one where your spinning up a host. I haven't spun up a single host in like 5 years, but I've made many clusters.
But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be better to work for a wider audience. Customer obsession and all