Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months

> They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. > The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices. I don’t even think that using the UI to spin up the machine is the right way to do that in an enterprise setting, you should always do that through Infrastructure as Code, to know exactly what you have up and running, just by looking at that as you would with any program. I’d suggest to use the UI for simple testing, for which the costs are often (but not always) negligi…

AWS actually has a pretty good price calculator with some decent presets (but FFS, can I have an "uncheck all" button?) but of course it's an entirely separate app. Amazon naturally wants some friction to having this pricing information handy, though I suspect the main reason has to do with Conway's Law: AWS still ships their org chart.

I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI. If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS. Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating the cost becomes an art rather than an exact science. And if you don't use these, there is no point of using AWS, there are plenty of "cheap" VPS providers.

>> The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...

Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow. Some devs are really good at that but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX. My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.

That's one of the things I like about Azure, they don't overwhelm you with listing prices beside every individual item as you're creating it, but they seem to always present a price on things that could be expensive. It's a good balance, I have yet to be surprised by a charge.

if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault. This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.

When I log into AWS there is a big graph saying "Cost savings" and offers all the different ways to save money. The idea that AWS is abusive seems a bit much to me. There is Amazon Lightsail for people who prefer pay-monthly upfront costs.