Yeah, everyone struggles with that, especially since AWS doesn’t really break down costs in a way that makes sense if you’re trying to work out which business unit or feature is costing you money (unless you set things up where every team has their own account or whatever, and even then).
I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.
Not only is that free, but I can’t imagine a better alternative. And they would have the same issue with allocation on prem. WithOUT tagging and Cost Explorer.
That doesn’t work in all cases. I’ve recently come across two examples where we had a hard time explaining our costs even though we extensively tag and even have fine-grained AWS accounts:
Some costs can’t be tagged or at least not easily, e.g. custom CloudWatch metrics.
For some resources it makes a lot more sense to provide them centrally for multiple services at once, e.g. NAT gateways or load balancers.
I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.
The company Cloudhealth Technologies has already been doing this for years, and not just with AWS but other cloud providers as well. Unfortunately they’ve been acquired by VMware so no idea if they’re still as good as they used to be…
This just isn’t true. AWS is very clear about pricing and provides pretty good tooling for analysis. Complex infrastructure will have complex costs though. AWS has its problems a’plenty, but unclear costs isn’t one in my opinion.
I agree, works fine for my stuff, but I’m pretty heavy on vanilla ec2, RDS, ec.
I can see some people running some of the more complicated products and getting flustered. Some of the compound stuff where you’re paying extra transaction costs on top of the serverless things
The author has no clue how spending works in cloud environments nor why it’s so complicated to calculate. This is a pretty uniformed article.
Yeah, everyone struggles with that, especially since AWS doesn’t really break down costs in a way that makes sense if you’re trying to work out which business unit or feature is costing you money (unless you set things up where every team has their own account or whatever, and even then).
I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.
Not to mention the costs change on the fly since load changes on the fly.
And yea AWS is like a used car dealer, they want the TCOS to be hard to calculate … “Oh you want the car to have wheels. That’s an extra fee…”.
Not sure what is hard in it - you need consistent tagging, and that by itself gives you a lot of mileage in cost explorer.
Not only is that free, but I can’t imagine a better alternative. And they would have the same issue with allocation on prem. WithOUT tagging and Cost Explorer.
That doesn’t work in all cases. I’ve recently come across two examples where we had a hard time explaining our costs even though we extensively tag and even have fine-grained AWS accounts:
The company Cloudhealth Technologies has already been doing this for years, and not just with AWS but other cloud providers as well. Unfortunately they’ve been acquired by VMware so no idea if they’re still as good as they used to be…
This just isn’t true. AWS is very clear about pricing and provides pretty good tooling for analysis. Complex infrastructure will have complex costs though. AWS has its problems a’plenty, but unclear costs isn’t one in my opinion.
So Netflix built this tool just for fun then? Obviously they feel AWS’ tools are lacking.
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I agree, works fine for my stuff, but I’m pretty heavy on vanilla ec2, RDS, ec.
I can see some people running some of the more complicated products and getting flustered. Some of the compound stuff where you’re paying extra transaction costs on top of the serverless things