It's a Trap!

You know what pisses me off more than anything else about working with Amazon AWS? The fact that nowhere on their account management page is a "pay now" button. Here are the options presented on the accounts page:

• View current charges and account activity, by service and usage type.
• Create multiple Users and manage the permissions for each of these Users within your AWS Account.
• Sign up to receive one bill for multiple AWS accounts, and add or remove accounts from your bill.
• View revenue and costs for your manageable Amazon DevPay products.
• View and edit current payment method, as well as add new payment methods.
• View and edit personal contact information and set communication preferences for email subscriptions.
• Download customizable usage reports for each service you are subscribed to.

None of those say "pay now." You'd think the top one might, vaguely, lead to a "pay now" method, since it's all about billing, or maybe the one about payment method, but no, none of them do.

I think Amazon doesn't care because it knows that AWS is one of those things that, like the Isilon IFS, once you're on, you can't afford to switch off. Your site grows by leaps and bounds, and by the time you realize you've got to migrate elsewhere, you're plugged into an architecture that requires man-months to disentangle.

Admiral Ackbar would be yelling.

A Certain Scientific Railgun, Episode 2 (anime)

Okay, that's it. I can't watch anymore of this. Kuroko's too smart to be this stupid, and too stupid to be this clever. The whole episode was built on girders of fail.

There's got to be something worth watching in this vein this season, ne?