The price drop that really gets me is EBS snapshot pricing. It's 3x the cost of the S3 storage that it is built upon, and it didn't used to be.
This, combined with the dearth of reasonably priced instances with large on-instance storage, artificially inflates our bills to the point that we're seriously considering abandoning AWS. just EBS snapshots are a full percent of our revenue.
My biggest gripe with snapshots is there is no actual way to see how much each snapshot consumes in S3. There is no Cloudwatch metric or any other way to see per snapshot or even per volume.
Sure, there is a billing per region but that's just not granular enough.
And we had snapshots for how many years?
As for the price, when did it more than tripled? I don't remember any blog or tweet or any other announcement. Anybody got a link?
The lack of visibility into per-snapshot cost is insane. We had a problem with the old deduplication process that meant that identically timed snapshots for identical servers with identical data could sometimes cost more than 2x the others. We only found this because we happened to have more the expensive volumes in one region than the others, so our snapshot bill was mysteriously $10k/month higher in that region.
We have essentially no idea how much many of our backups actually cost.
The price didn't triple, what happened was they dropped S3 pricing substantially but never dropped snapshot pricing, even though it's based on S3.
EFS is still in preview 6 months later since announcement.
Let's see if it goes GA during reInvent.
I'm just hoping for NFS 4.1 support so that I can start using it on my Windows Server 2012R2 instances. Currently, EFS uses NFS 4.0 which is incompatible with NFS 4.1 for some reason. :(
But I entirely agree; it's a good time for Amazon to look at the suite of products and make them a tad more cohesive. It can be a bit disjointed at times, especially when trying to tie multiple services together.
I wonder if the drivers are:
* Culture of always having to be seen to innovate
* (Percieved) Competition to keep launching new features to stay ahead
With that said there have been improvements; for example EFS building on top of EBS.