I get why it's like this.

Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console.

When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set it via AI into a cdk construct. Usually pick a relatively normal machine type digging through all the ilvarious enterprise discounts (which are not reflectedin the prices in the console). Then as I roll out or when I get resource limit alarms on the fleet I adjust the instance types. Or when accounting asks me about price. In those cases I usually look if it's worth it to optimize.

The enterprise discounts are a big consideration. Every year new hires make bad decisions because they don't know about the discounts. They wildly affect total cost. Some things are more expensive (lambda first few years), and others are very cheap so we dog food. The console price in no way reflects reality.

In 15 years we've had about 1k services stood up, around 700 are active. 2000 or total counting tutorials and tests. That means out of an eng org of 500, we've made those decisions maybe 10k times total.

That's how Amazon thinks about it as well. So yeah I agree that the UI isn't meant to be like one where your spinning up a host. I haven't spun up a single host in like 5 years, but I've made many clusters.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be better to work for a wider audience. Customer obsession and all

AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.

> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.

This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession.

That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon sucks overall, not just for pricing/packaging but even getting basic shit done. So perhaps Amazon (or at least AWS) doesn't think a good UX is a key ingredient to demonstrating Customer Obsession.

I would argue that the intentions don't matter at all, the end result is all that matters both for the buyer and seller. In systems design, it is often said that The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Good intentions can produce very bad systems with bad outcomes, and neutral/bad intentions can create good systems that benefit everyone.

I think that applies both to Amazon's dev system and pricing system. From what I hear about the insides, alignment is chaotic neutral inside of Amazon, but that shouldn't affect how we judge the system itself.

Personally I think the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.

Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right?

So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no.

Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - configuring all that stuff on the UI, and getting it right is torture.

It just goes to show if you are the first big player in a space, you can have whatever UX. No UX will override that first mover advantage. I could cite countless examples, where the first commonly known company rules the space and no newcomer with a flashy UX can come close, no matter how hard they try.

Judging by how much things jump around on the screen when I navigate from one view to another I agree.