The longer answer is that, although Amazon does provide many tools, as I'm sure anyone who has attempted to use them for cost analysis and/or forecasting has found, they are, at best, difficult (i.e. require a remarkable amount of human labor to extract the desired information, if that's even possible). At worst, one discovers that it's impossible to find out what one truly wants from the tool, even after exerting the effort, although it might be a close approximation. Amazon has little incentive to spend money improving a tool that would help their customers send them less revenue.
> The longer answer is that, although Amazon does provide many tools, as I'm sure anyone who has attempted to use them for cost analysis and/or forecasting has found, they are, at best, difficult (i.e. require a remarkable amount of human labor to extract the desired information, if that's even possible). At worst, one discovers that it's impossible to find out what one truly wants from the tool, even after exerting the effort, although it might be a close approximation. Amazon has little incentive to spend money improving a tool that would help their customers send them less revenue.
I completely agree.
I tried out that complicated as hell calculator, and found that for a lot of fields I was just inputting numbers, with no idea what I was doing.
I think the Cloud Formation price predictor thing is pretty useful for a Cloud Formation script. But I'm new to Cloud Formation and probably won't use it b/c it may be too complex for my needs and I don't know what I'm doing.
The longer answer is that, although Amazon does provide many tools, as I'm sure anyone who has attempted to use them for cost analysis and/or forecasting has found, they are, at best, difficult (i.e. require a remarkable amount of human labor to extract the desired information, if that's even possible). At worst, one discovers that it's impossible to find out what one truly wants from the tool, even after exerting the effort, although it might be a close approximation. Amazon has little incentive to spend money improving a tool that would help their customers send them less revenue.