One small issue I have as a developer who can spin up just about anything on AWS is this:
I have zero insight into the costs.
Yes, my company could turn that on for me but it's rare that they do so it's nearly impossible to know if I did something that costs a lot of money (relatively or in general) without access to the cost explorer/billing dashboard.
And before "well can look up what a t2.2xlarge costs and calculate it", sure. In a very contrived example I might be able to see what it costs but so many things are hidden/hard to see in AWS. For example, I recently spun up an RDS customer on my own AWS account. After testing for a while I decided it wasn't what I wanted and I deleted the cluster. Fast forward a month and my bill is well over what I expected (Like $30, no it's not a ton of money but it's my personal account and I wasn't expecting that charge). Come to find out it created a VPC as part of the RDS cluster (I think maybe it was for the RDS proxy? Still not sure) that didn't get deleted. I had to go chase that down and even that process wasn't easy. I had to make sure that it wasn't be used by anything else and then delete other things that were created when I made the RDS cluster before I could remove the VPC.
I was only able to do the above because I had access to the billing info. I would have left that VPC indefinitely on my work's AWS account by accident and been none the wiser.
I'm more than happy to take costs into account but without access to what things are actually costing us I can't help that much. Mostly because I need to know the costs to know what's worth optimizing. Sure I know I could improve X feature but if that costs us pennies a day (or month sometimes) then it's not worth it. Similarly if I know feature/infra Y is costing $XX,000/mo then I know I should rethink or investigate if that's correct/worth it.
in the past, i had a case like this: dev accidentally enable backup policy for test database with no retention. finops think that db backup is important and ignore it. dev has no access to billing and have no idea what's creeping up the bill
Exactly, sometimes it's not clear at all what something will cost (and/or if the costs will go up). I'm happy to glance at the monthly costs here and there and if I see a jump I can dive in and see where it's coming from. We all make silly mistakes, like leaving logs on infinite retention in CloudWatch, and that's something I can easily fix/address but only if I have the info.
I've asked, off-hand, a couple times for billing access but nothing has come of it. I don't want to seem pushy but also it feels like data I need to perform my job to the best of my ability (especially at a small company). I don't think it comes from a place of "We don't want to give Josh access" or secrecy as much as it not being a priority but I need to bring it up again.
I’m very aware of that tool but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spec’d things out on that then seen very different prices when I actually create things in AWS. In part because the tool doesn’t take some things into account or because sometimes it’s impossible to guess your usage for a new feature.
I don’t believe the VPC was factored in when I used that calculator, even after selecting RDS Proxy.
I have zero insight into the costs.
Yes, my company could turn that on for me but it's rare that they do so it's nearly impossible to know if I did something that costs a lot of money (relatively or in general) without access to the cost explorer/billing dashboard.
And before "well can look up what a t2.2xlarge costs and calculate it", sure. In a very contrived example I might be able to see what it costs but so many things are hidden/hard to see in AWS. For example, I recently spun up an RDS customer on my own AWS account. After testing for a while I decided it wasn't what I wanted and I deleted the cluster. Fast forward a month and my bill is well over what I expected (Like $30, no it's not a ton of money but it's my personal account and I wasn't expecting that charge). Come to find out it created a VPC as part of the RDS cluster (I think maybe it was for the RDS proxy? Still not sure) that didn't get deleted. I had to go chase that down and even that process wasn't easy. I had to make sure that it wasn't be used by anything else and then delete other things that were created when I made the RDS cluster before I could remove the VPC.
I was only able to do the above because I had access to the billing info. I would have left that VPC indefinitely on my work's AWS account by accident and been none the wiser.
I'm more than happy to take costs into account but without access to what things are actually costing us I can't help that much. Mostly because I need to know the costs to know what's worth optimizing. Sure I know I could improve X feature but if that costs us pennies a day (or month sometimes) then it's not worth it. Similarly if I know feature/infra Y is costing $XX,000/mo then I know I should rethink or investigate if that's correct/worth it.