If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles. AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale. The problem is that scaling on expertise isn’t instant and that’s where you’re more likely to make a careless mistake and deploy something relatively costly.
It's a good thing aws saves us so much money that we can afford to hire aws specialists.
If you plan to scale to that extent, then why do you not have the money to hire the people who can use AWS? At least part time or as temporary consultants.
This:
> The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles
makes me doubt this:
> AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale.
I'm wondering what the point of all of this is.
If you can afford the large fixed cost of vertical integration, it's always cheaper to do things yourself, so the sweet spot for using providers like AWS is scaling down, not up. A managed DB lets you hire a fraction of a sysadmin or devops person from AWS.
The moment you end up paying enough to AWS to hire a sysadmin, you basically are getting an antagonistic sysadmin from AWS, whose primary goal is to make as much money off you as possible. The incentives are not aligned.
> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.
What a baffling comment. Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service? You started with one problem and now you have at least two? And what kind of perverse incentive are you creating? Don't you think your "finops" person has a vested interest in preserving their job by ensuring billing complexity will always be there?
> Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service?
Absolutely. This was common for complicated services like telecom/long distance even in the pre-cloud days. Big companies would have a staff or hire a service to review telecom bills and make sure they weren’t overpaying.
Paradoxically you are both right. Yes, the situation seems dystopian. Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.
> Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.
Is it, though? At best someone wearing that hat will explain the bill you're getting. What value do you get from that?
To cut costs, either you microoptimize things, of you redesign systems to shed expenses. The former gets you nothing, the latter is not something a "finops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) brings to the table.
You need to know what to optimise which means you need to know what you are spending on.
I did say it applies IFF and only IFF you choose to use these services, and if you have chosen to use these services you have presumably decided they are good value for money. If not, why are they using AWS.
Of course the complexity and extra cost of managing the billing is something that someone who has chosen to use AWS has already factored in, right?
The alternative is to not use AWS.
> IFF and only IFF
If and only if and only if and only if? :)
(also, while on the topic, I think a simple "if" covers it here, since the relationship is not bidirectional)
If the cost of hiring the finops person is less than the savings over operating without one then you hire one, if it isn't then you don't.
It's not baffling. They know what they are getting billed for, that's transparent. They don't understand WHY they are getting billed 6x of what they expected. The problem here isn't with AWS, the problem is they don't understand why their usage is at 6x.
> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you
At that point wouldn't it simply be cheaper to do VMs?
Yes, very likely, but then why are you using AWS at all?
I think a lot of people are missing a key part of the wording of my comment, that capitalised for emphasis "IFF" (which means "if and only if").
I am absolutely certain a lot of people would save money using VMs - or at scale bare metal.
IMO a lot of people are using AWS because it is a "safe" choice management buy into that is not expensive in context (its not a big proportion of costs).
But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists.
Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider.
You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
> You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company.
Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
I've worked in places where customers (especially municipalities in Germany) have questioned the use of American hosting providers. I don't know whether it has actually prevented a deal from going through (I wasn't close enough to sales to know), but it was consistently an obstacle in some markets. This is despite everything being hosted in EU datacenters.
Isn't the reason that even if it is hosted physically in the EU, if it is an american company the data is still not safe from american spy agencies?
Yeah, something like that.
Yes, definitely.
Most small business I have dealt with use AWS do just need a VPS. If they are willing to move to a scary unknown supplier I suggest (unknown to them, very often one that would be well known to people on HN) then I suggest AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing - it significantly cheaper than an instance plus storage, just from buying them bundled (which, to be fair to Amazon, is common practice).
My own stuff goes on VPSs.
> AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing
Except it is still Amazon and subject to the same weird billing practices. I once terminated a Lightsail instance and they kept charging me, claiming that I didn't terminate the static IP address associated with it. The IP address itself cost the same as the instance + IP address did.
Now, that would make sense in "real" AWS, but you'd expect it to be more straightforward with a simplified service like Lightsail.