Corey Quinn

For eight years, I’ve watched the same story play out: excited newcomers sign up for AWS thinking they have a free account, only to get blindsided by unexpected charges.

Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.

In short: Amazon’s Aurora DSQL is a technical marvel, but its pricing is absolutely baffling. And I mean just that. They’re not gouging customers. It’s not unfair. How they arrived at their pricing makes sense given the product’s development constraints (presumably including things such as “thou shalt not lose us our corporate ass on this service, as we cannot make it up in volume”). It’s just monumentally confusing.

There’s a continuum, with “Innovation” on one end and “Optimization” on the other. Where are you?

Something strange started happening at re:Invent last year: new EC2 instances started launching without Reserved Instance support.

Yesterday, AWS lobbed a bit of a water balloon into my inbox.…

In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts.

Don’t worry, Reserved Instances will still be around. You just don’t have to think about them anymore unless you want to.

When it comes to the exact cost cross-AZ data transfer, the AWS documentation is a bit ambiguous. So I ran a little experiment to figure out how much it costs to move data between availability zones in the same region.

The only vendors selling multi-cloud dashboards are the ones who’d be out of business if you didn’t buy them.

AWS is very eager to tell you something that they can’t quite articulate.