I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections (in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that information in the new instance flow of the management console.
It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.
In many ways, I love AWS. But the web page is possibly the least user-friendly page I visit with any frequency.
Even after I am signed into AWS, there are "Sign Up Now" buttons everywhere. So, it's confusing whether or not I am signed in.
I expect the big icon in the upper left to bring me to a useful "home page" like the AWS management console. Instead it brings me to a page that is just a big advertisement (for services I already use.)
I just want to get to my EC2 management console quickly, so I sometimes click on the link that says "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)."
That brings me to an advertisement page for EC2... again, this is after I'm already signed in and just trying to use the service. That EC2 specific advertising page still doesn't have a direct link to the EC2 management console.
To do anything useful, I need to click on AWS Management Console which only becomes visible after I mouse over "My Account/Console." But the "My Account" link, the only thing on the whole page that I ever want, is in a smaller font than almost everything else on the page.
Eventually, I wrote my own little AWS interface with python & boto just to avoid having to kludge through the web page.
EDIT: I apologize if this is off the topic of how to present pricing. I got excited when I saw an AWS engineer asking "what can we do better"
I've been using aws for awhile so I've gotten used to the sign-in part and never have trouble getting to the console.
Where I get lost is trying to find the reference documentation as opposed to the newbie guides or the architecture overviews. Scenarios similar to: "crap it's been a year and a half since I've bundled a new AMI and I forgot the exact steps" where I need to look up some detail of the API. That's where I wind up going to google to search the amazon site for the docs I need.
As long as you're collecting feedback, please have the console default to an interesting page. 98% of the time I'm opening it, I go to look at the instances tab. Then I experience a brief moment of panic when it shows I have no instances, because it shows some region other than the one with my servers.
Not the person you asked the question to but, if I may, I would suggest a 2 (or maybe 3) step drilldown.
A high level, more condensed, summary-type of chart (kind of like the one seen in the original post) that would give a clear overview of the differences between the various types of instances (OnDemand, Reserved, Spot).
And then a way to drill down into instance types and see the details (AZ, Linux vs Windows, etc...)
My issues with the current layout are:
- all the text blocks in between charts that are not really informative after you've read them once.
- The fact that the instance types, data transfer, EBS, etc... are all listed at the same logical level when I make a clear distinction between, on the one hand, all the different instance types and, on the other hand, everything that pertains to an instance (logically underneath an instance).
Not entirely related to the OP, but I would love to see ssh://<public DNS name> links on the EC2 instance page. It sounds trivial, but being able to click these links to login to an instance (instead of copy hostname, open terminal, paste hostname) would save me a lot of time each day.
