How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#2It's surprising to me that cloud compute vendors make billing so complicated that a whole cottage industry of viable (?) businesses exists just to help you decipher spending.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#3It's surprising to me that cloud compute vendors make billing so complicated that a whole cottage industry of viable (?) businesses exists just to help you decipher spending.
I think that is totally on purpose. They will get you with cheap storage or instance cost and then they will drain you with egress cost or persistent storage cost or ip addresses or whatnot.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#4It's surprising to me that cloud compute vendors make billing so complicated that a whole cottage industry of viable (?) businesses exists just to help you decipher spending.
I think that is totally on purpose. They will get you with cheap storage or instance cost and then they will drain you with egress cost or persistent storage cost or ip addresses or whatnot.
Yup. It makes chasing the best storage deals an endless game of whack-a-mole.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that is totally on purpose. They will get you with cheap storage or instance cost and then they will drain you with egress cost or persistent storage cost or ip addresses or whatnot.
Yup. It makes chasing the best storage deals an endless game of whack-a-mole.
S3 Intelligent Tiering actually does help with this considerably though. They do try to shift your objects to the storage class that makes the most sense cost-wise based off of access patterns and don't charge anything additional for doing that.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#6Advice to clouds: Please simplify your costing structure for the small guys. It should be easy to understand and calculate. Per hour units are infuriating as well, it’s meaningless to people. If my lawyer charged me by seconds, I would have no intuitive understanding of costs until I pull out lawyercalculator.com. Billing can still happen in microunits.
I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation technique, a dark pattern by marketing people.
Edit: I want to clarify, Billing can still happen in microunits.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#7Advice to clouds: Please simplify your costing structure for the small guys. It should be easy to understand and calculate. Per hour units are infuriating as well, it’s meaningless to people. If my lawyer charged me by seconds, I would have no intuitive understanding of costs until I pull out lawyercalculator.com. Billing can still happen in microunits. I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation t…
I'm with you on the first part, but not the second (ha).
Time-based billing should be granular to the second/minute/hour depending on the service, but should be listed for the customer in a table upwards an order of magnitude or so.
VM instances often get turned up and down in less than an hour. Serverless functions (AWS Lambda) execute and then end in milliseconds, often.
But yes, billing should be simpler/more clearly reported and calculated. And many of their services seem to bill in overly complicated ways.
On the other hand, I think some AWS services are essentially free for small amounts of usage, so individuals have less to worry about re: billing.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#8Advice to clouds: Please simplify your costing structure for the small guys. It should be easy to understand and calculate. Per hour units are infuriating as well, it’s meaningless to people. If my lawyer charged me by seconds, I would have no intuitive understanding of costs until I pull out lawyercalculator.com. Billing can still happen in microunits. I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation t…
I'm with you on the first part, but not the second (ha). Time-based billing should be granular to the second/minute/hour depending on the service, but should be listed for the customer in a table upwards an order of magnitude or so. VM instances often get turned up and down in less than an hour. Serverless functions (AWS Lambda) execute and then end in milliseconds, often. But yes, billing should be simpler/more clea…
> Time-based billing should be granular to the second/minute/hour depending on the service, but should be listed for the customer in a table upwards an order of magnitude or so.
That's what I meant by "Billing can happen in microunits". You described it better.
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#9Advice to clouds: Please simplify your costing structure for the small guys. It should be easy to understand and calculate. Per hour units are infuriating as well, it’s meaningless to people. If my lawyer charged me by seconds, I would have no intuitive understanding of costs until I pull out lawyercalculator.com. Billing can still happen in microunits. I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation t…
Lambda used to charge by chunks of 100ms. When they switched to charging by the millisecond, without otherwise changing the pricing, that was a universal price drop.
More granularity tends to mean cheaper for you. Your lawyer doesn't charge you by the second because charging in chunks of 6 (or 15) minutes is more profitable for them.
If you're a very small player you're unlikely to care about the savings in question because they'll be single-digit, if that. But I'd argue that using AWS if you're a very small player -- and don't have plans to expand -- is a poor idea. Digital Ocean, Heroku etc are far more adapted to those use cases.
AWS is a poor choice at tinyscale because of how flexible it is. It's a bring-your-own-everything service. You have to set up policies in order for AWS's own services to access each other and features offered in the web UI to work properly. Their billing systems make a ton of sense for the companies that spend millions of dollars.
You would not be happy doing your grocery shopping at the warehouse that provides your local shop; and yet it would probably be cheaper overall as you'd be cutting the middleman. Of course you'd run into a lot of other issues. AWS is not stopping you from using it but still. There's a reason their most successful sales program is one that can afford dumping $100k on startups: "It's not for you."
(Disclaimer: There's a fuckton of awful, actual billing issues with AWS that obscure the bill for no good reason. Most small players complaining are not talking about those, aside maybe from the egregious bandwidth pricing.)
Re: How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. It makes chasing the best storage deals an endless game of whack-a-mole.
S3 Intelligent Tiering actually does help with this considerably though. They do try to shift your objects to the storage class that makes the most sense cost-wise based off of access patterns and don't charge anything additional for doing that.
There is a small per object/month charge for Intelligent Tiering. The 30 day minimum, even for objects in the Frequent Access Tier, can also drown you in prorated charges if applied to a high churn prefix.