Allen but one of the good onesSee, this is the sort of thing that's turning me off of AWS. Following a recommendation to take a certain action, I spent three solid weeks verifying whether it would actually save money, enumerating the costs involved in implementating, scouring the documentation for non-obvious charges, and STILL missed the massive once-off expense that ate up all our savings for the next 3 months.
I did my due dilligence, I triple-checked my work, not my first rodeo and all that, and they still beat me.
Graham Downs@uastronomer It's not just AWS. We use Azure at work, and their costing is just as obscure and difficult to understand. All we want to know is, "WHAT IS IT GOING TO COST?!"
But apparently that's an exceptionally difficult question to answer. :P
I have a little experience with OCI because I use their Always Free plan to run a couple of Linux servers as a hobby. Although it doesn't cost me anything, I have skimmed through their paid offerings from time to time, and it's the same thing: nobody seems to be able to give a straight answer to the question of how much these things cost. :/
@uastronomer Like, all I want to know is, this VM with this OS installed on it and this much RAM and this many cores, and this size drive, is going to cost Rxxx per month to run.
Not, well, gee, it depends on CPU hours and how much percentage of the overall CPU capacity you actually use, and then there's the RAM....
No. How much is it going to cost us to run? Full stop. :-P
@GrahamDowns So in this particular case, we're managing a huge S3 bucket, almost 100TB, and our consultants have been advising for ages that we use a lifecycle rule to transition old stuff to a cheaper storage tier. We had concerns that their models couldn't account for, hence the big project to try and actually do the maths.
Anyway. When the S3 documentation says that the fee for transitioning from SA to IA is "n/a", that's only true if you're using intelligent tiering. If you're using lifecycle rules, then you need to look further down the same table where those same costs are listed a second time, this time with actual fees.
It's like those puzzles, optical illusions, word games, where you can't unsee it once you've seen it. But good luck spotting it for the first time without help. That's the diabolical genius of their obfuscated billing.
@uastronomer Ugh. Sounds like a mission. I think Amazon's S3 buckets are sort-of analogous to Azure's Blob Containers, right?
If so, we've also got many many terabytes of stuff stored in those. In fact, we've recently been on a big exercise to consolidate it all and try to free up some space. In the beginning, it seems really cheap, but believe you me, it adds up quickly.
@GrahamDowns Yeah, basically the same. Object storage, cheap.
Leon Cowle@uastronomer @GrahamDowns Have you considered (or are you in a position to recommend) a different provider? There are so many S3-API-compatible ones out there. Eg. BackBlaze's B2 is much better value than S3, while being a 100% drop-in replacement (just change the endpoint name, nothing else). I know this comes with challenges about access policies, etc, though, because no IAM/roles/KMS/etc. But I'm sure there are many usecases out there where it can make sense.
@leoncowle @GrahamDowns Oh sure, I've considered it and even mentioned it but... nobody's sounded too keen on it. And S3 is actually a pretty small part of the overall bill, less than the savings we're expecting from a single change that's scheduled in the near future, so it's not a very compelling sell.