Critics On AWS Costs
Public cloud providers are marketing geniuses. They convinced us that using cloud environment is cheap. It’s not. It has many benefits but low price is not one of them. When you run on their infrastructure at small scale it’s just fine. When you scale up, you find out that cloud costs can sum up to crazy amounts. You will usually learn it the hard way, when receiving the first AWS bill after scaling up. They tell us that we save money because they take care of the infrastructure. Well, it saves money and it very convenient as well, but(!), after building your systems on their infrastructure and users start to use it, you find out that not everything that shines is gold.
Scaling Up In Public Cloud Providers Is Expensive.
Spinning up machines when running on AWS for example is incredibly easy. Three clicks and you have a new virtual machine up and running. That’s great for velocity and for AWS bank account. I admire AWS for their ability to scale up computing infrastructure, but they can be more fair when it comes to using their infrastructure cost efficiently.
Why Do They Hide Prices??
Can you imagine buying products at an e-commerce website that doesn’t state pricing next to product itself? That’s what happens at AWS. The prices are not presented next to the service you use. AWS only shows them in a different page, that you have to look for specifically, and when you find it, it is super complicated to understand the pricing. In my opinion it is not fair.
Why Do They Hide Our Usage??
Analyzing what you pay for is extremely difficult. They do offer a few basic metrics and cost break down, but they are really insufficient. The granularity they offer is at the service level. It is fine when you run on a small scale. It becomes a nightmare when running at scale. Following up after your costs when you run 300 EC2, a few k8s clusters, 50 RDSs and 1000 s3 buckets is difficult. You have work arounds but in my opinion it should be much easer to understand what you are paying for.
AWS Should Automate Costs Savings For Us
I think that AWS should offer better automated cost saving options to help us control our costs. Here are just a few things that they can automate — Right size EC2 Instances, turn off ideal machines and k8s clusters, delete old backups (Or at least notify about them) and right size EBSs... It would be so much nicer if AWS could just make those things work. Wouldn’t it?
Why Is AWS Trusted Advisor So Limited?
Aws offer a service named AWS Trusted advisor that recommends potential cost savings. It seems good at first glance, but it is very limited:
- Costly — You need to pay for it (100$ for small businesses and starting at 15,000$ for enterprises)
- Limited — The recommendations are very limited
- Report based — It doesn’t alert you when things change
- Manual — It won’t automate saving for you
AWS Should Be More Fair When It Comes To Costs
Amazon (And AWS) is one of the richest companies in the world. I think that they really deserve it because they changed our lives for the better. I 100% believe in their rights to earn good money for the amazing services they offer. Yet, they should help us to understand, control, and optimize our cloud costs. Their revenues are enormous (62 Billion/a year, as of today), they don’t have to make it so hard for us to manage cloud costs.
Lets Talk
Please reach out or leave a comment below, I would love to hear your opinion and experience on the topic! Do you share the same feelings as I do? Do you think I am exaggerating? Or have I only scratched the surface of the topic?
