Cloud Cost Control: Best Practices | Hacker News Reader

Cloud Cost Control: Best Practices

bestcloudplatform.com

40 pointsscrummy13 comments

Implementing a simple and effective tagging strategy for visibility and monitoring is one of the most important aspect of cloud cost control. From our experience, this is where most of our own users start.

Knowing the "why's" and "where" will help everyone within the org (eng and finance) make better decisions on what and where to focus on (https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/aws-tagging-best-practices...). Also, it'll make AWS Cost Explorer or any other cost managements tools WAY more effective.

Cost optimization can feel like drinking from a firehouse since there are so many different strategies, and approaches to it (autoscaling, spot, reserved instances/savings plans, eliminating idle & wasted resources, etc.). Also, you have to apply your OWN organizational context to it as well (business and tech side). There is a fine balance companies and eng dept need to take with cloud cost control since it can be a huge time commitment to pull your end dept into.

(disclaimer // founder of https://www.cloudforecast.io)

TL;DR - you can't fix what you don't measure.

Tagging does this.

Step one for me is just educating people on how cloud providers charge for resources. So many people don't understand everything that goes into an AWS bill.

Take AWS for example - everyone seems to account for lambda runtime cost, but a lot of people forget/ignore execution cost, API Gateway cost, bandwidth costs, etc. Or they'll account for S3 storage but not S3 API costs.

While good tagging certainly helps figure out where money is spent, sometimes it's too late since things have been built on bad architectures based on misunderstandings of charges.

I think this post misses the easiest and often most dramatic savings - making upfront commitments. There’s a concept called coverage that teams can use to calculate how much they can save with no right sizing or other infra changes and often the answer is 50% of the bill. https://vantage.sh/blog/aws-coverage-reserved-instances-savi...

Upfront commitments aren't cost optimization management, you're simple taking money for reselling reserved instances and if the company spend is large, most likely it will get even better price on savings plan

if wanted to make upfront commitments, I'd get my own data center. What's the point of the cloud when you're locked in?

To focus on fewer problems.

The point is commitment allows you to optimise cost of baseline capacity. The only real benefits of the cloud are one cost centre, scale out without capex.

Quite frankly if you’re in the cloud you’re locked in one way or another.

One thing every company should do, tag each resource by team-projects and at end of week-month attribute cost to each team. Seeing a bill make the developer and manager more conscious of their choices.

agree tagging is good, but you only identify costs by teams and not solving optimization part. All the way you will need tools for autoscaling or to take an advantage of spot instances

My current consulting gig is at a government superdepartment with so many agencies agglomerated into them that IT treats them like external customers, with charge backs, contracts, the works. This includes ubiquitous cost centre code tagging of all resources.

What cost savings do you think this achieves?

Nothing. Literally nothing.

I actually tried to cut their cloud spend, I really did! They were burning through $250K per month. Now, a year later... it's $350K.

First off, every team negotiates a "budget" with some paper-pusher finance guy who has literally no clue whether the spend is ludicrously high or wonderfully frugal. Zero clue. None. No idea what a "core" is, or what the funny database product names in the cost breakdown even mean.

So you end up with websites where citizens occassionally upload cute pictures of wildlife getting 50x the opex budget of critical infrastructure and that's seen as perfectly fine. The budget is approved. The paperwork is done. It's fine now! Don't touch.

I tried to optimise a few of these systems, and I was literally screamed at. Mid-level managers on $100K a year were telling me I was "wasting their time" trying to cut their cloud spend by $100K per annum.

In some cases they were right. I had meetings where I was trying to convince a team to let me cut their annual spend from $5K to $4K. The result was that they politely pointed out that this mere 20% savings had already been eaten by the cost of the meeting itself.

This is the problem. The big-budget projects won the fight to get that budget and will never let go of their victory. The small-budget projects are not worth optimising because you lose the benefits to the paperwork overheads.

Meanwhile, using efficient shared platforms is also out the window because nobody wants to share any more. Why pay for the resources used by another team from your budget? How would you convince your boss to pay for that?

Sharing is caring, but charge-backs make for fiefdoms. This is mine, that is yours, go pay for it yourself.

So that's how you get VMs with 8 cores sitting at 0.1% load.

You're going to say that that's no so bad because of CPU sharing and overcommit. Bzzt. Not in the public cloud: those cores are 100% yours!

The public cloud is not VMware. You don't share. Everyone gets a slice to themselves. That's why it costs so much!

> So that's how you get VMs with 8 cores sitting at 0.1% load.

Future proofed and we didn't even need to ask for a budget increase in the out years. /s

Not a bad list but also nothing different than what the cloud companies tell their customers directly to do.

The underlying “problem” here is usually when people/companies act as if the cloud just relieves them of all responsibility to manage their infrastructure, including controlling what gets built, by whom, charging what. AWS speaks of their “shared responsibility model” that summarizes what this should look like.

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