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Comment by mherrmann | Hacker News Reader

> There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting.

It could be there are such tools. But they are impossible to find, setup or understand for someone who is not already an AWS expert. I recently got a $500 bill from AWS. It was impossible for me to find out which S3 buckets (or even specific files) caused these costs. I looked at this for half an hour and have used AWS before. They just don't tell you how to obtain this information. Or maybe they do, and it is so well hidden that it might as well not exist. This was a horrible user experience. As a customer, I want to know what I'm being charged for. The fact that AWS make it so difficult make me never want to use them again.

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You can get cost breakdown on a more granular level by taking advantage of tagging. You can tag your resources logically and get a break down by tag.

The biggest mistake I see is that people jump into AWS whole hog without doing the research or if they are large enough, hiring someone who knows what they are doing.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

I don't understand why I even need to do manual things such as "tagging" (besides learning what that even means in AWS) to find out something as simple as why I'm being charged as much as I'm being charged. I'm sorry. It's inexcusable.

And large organizations would complain about why they couldn’t group their resources like they want to. Having individual bucket costs would be of very little use for cost allocation and to tie back to something like a department. For instance, we tag every resource created with the same CloudFormation template with the same tag. We can get billing based on an “application” and all of its related resources.

Just like AWS is not understandable to someone new, I feel the modern front end ecosystem is royal cluster but yet and still thousands of people understand it after a 12 week boot camp.

You could have both. Let advanced users tag. But give less sophisticated users insight into what they're being charged for - without having to go through a 12 week boot camp.

Well, was most of that $500 for storage costs, or for network? Surely you don't expect the monthly bill to include details about particular files or bucket sizes? Have you enabled CloudTrail logging and/or VPC flow logs?

It's not my intention to victim-blame here, yet do bear in mind that there are many, many ways to use the services and to expose resources to the bottomless appetite of the internet. Maybe Digital Ocean or Linode or the like would be a better option for starting out.

It's literally called "Billing" and the "Cost Explorer" is the first item in the navigation when you go to the page. I've attached a screenshot and highlighted it for you. FYI, this month is the first time I've opened the AWS GUI in 4-5 months, and it took me about a minute to find the billing page and drill into our AWS costs. I've provided an image that shows how to get to the cost explorer from "Billing" (you can use the search box available on the AWS account landing page to type in "Billing" in order to access the billing page of AWS).

EDIT: sorry, I forgot to include the screenshot link - https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr

This does not show the costs per bucket. Specifically, I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain this information.

You're right, it's shitty of them to not provide that out of the box. However, if it's such a big problem for you, as others have pointed out, it's easy to solve. If you are paying $500/month for S3, you must be processing quite a large amount of data - as another poster pointed out, there's an easy to fix it. If you weren't going to use S3 for this, what would you use instead for this use-case?

I literally just search on Google “How do I find the price per s3 bucket” and the first link is this.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/s3-fi...

Why do people think that they can give Amazon a credit card number and expect everything to be easy enough for them and suitable for a large enterprise? AWS offers something for beginners - Lightsail. When that outgrows their needs, they can peer their behind the scenes LightSail VPC to a full fledge VPC.

I look forward to migrating to Linode's S3-compatible object storage. I appreciate that you are agreeing that it's shitty of AWS. But I disagree that it's "easy to solve". Like I said, I already spent quite some time looking into how to solve it. And having to set up logging for a bucket (and learning how to do this in AWS's complex interface), and if I understand correctly creating another bucket to receive those logs, and learning how to then obtain and interpret the results? Maybe you're above my paygrade but I do not consider this easy.

What drew you to using S3 in the first place while also discounting the risk that it might get a lot of use, and thus a lot of cost? Like, if a 100MB file in a public bucket got a bazillion downloads, did you not want that to happen?

If this is an ongoing issue and you can’t get the information from something that is in front of S3 (cloudfront/your application etc) then you can enable bucket logging in the settings (which costs!)

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