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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

They might try to educate, but I don't think they engineer their products to make "getting it right" easy. It's not in their interests, but they _could_ make a product that is much easier to use correctly, cheaply, or both.

AWS creates work, and creates spend, much more than it needs to.

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Yes, AWS incentives are not aligned with their customers. Any sufficiently sized organization on AWS ends up building custom tooling to help manage cost. They may also hire consultants to help optimize cost.

This is all by design.

My experience is that AWS is remarkably open to helping you get things right. They seem to focus on making things possible before easy, but (Enterprise) support is quite good and have specific incentives on spend efficiency that run counter to the short-term goals of Amazon.

I can only imagine how the Oracle cloud must go for victims^Wcustomers.

Systems engineering is hard, on-prem or in-cloud.

TIL ^w

I don't get it yet... what does it mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U

AWS TAMs I know spend a sizable portion of their time making sure that their costs are low for their customers, monitoring monthly spend and looking for inefficiencies. Business and Enterprise support customers also receive full access to Trusted Advisor, an automated tool which checks your account for spending inefficiencies and best practice violations.

Enterprise support has saved our team from our own screwups in the past, so I've also had positive experiences with them.

When your profit margin is 25%+, the bigger risk is not people reducing spend, it's moving to a different cloud. Helping people decrease spend by increasing complexity is a form of vendor lock-in, and preserves the long-term revenue.

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