Reducing our AWS bill by $100k
usefathom.com
usefathom.com
Our startup suffers from our AWS bill, but it's well below 10k a month. So we would be glad to reduce it by 3k or 5k.
And you still have not bought the HW...
Yes, you need to think that you don't go into the worst cost traps. But no form of subcontracting/purchasing frees you from making the right choices.
I am somewhat suspicious that that's not really the solution.
You trade "waste", and high up-front cost, for a significantly hightened sustained cost.
You trade setting up systems and proper prior planning for understanding proprietary interfaces and understanding cost systems.
It's too far to say it's a scam: it's a trade-off.
There are much cheaper on-prem solutions and there are cheaper cloud systems.
The difference is that the cloud ones TCO is only lower at either absurdly small volumes or absurdly spiky loads (IE; a website that only operates at full load for 3hrs a day and is otherwise under 1 request per hour)
The tradeoff is that if you have a sudden hit event you may simply not have the raw horsepower to handle the influx, but you also can't be hit with surprise $100k+ bills for a configuration mistake.
I struggle with this. The only cost savings projects I've had success pushing forward are when it's fairly large. But I wouldn't be surprised if most waste is kind of like a death by a thousand cuts where it's to expensive to address them individually.
For some of the these, if you use a engineers pay of 100/hr, if you want to save 2000 a year you need to ship the whole thing in 20 hours, just half of a week of work. It's almost not worth talking about using the hourly rate.
A good systems administrator works to regulate this tendency. She/he asks what these processes are, whether all this used storage will be needed indefinitely, what the dependencies are between different services. A good sysadmin balances the laziness of programmers who don't want to think about or care about systems long term.
Marketing for moving everything to the cloud also has tons of kickbacks that encourage decisionmakers to want to fire sysadmins and pay Amazon so they can get free stuff. Is it completely nuts that someone will have their company pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Amazon because they get a few thousand dollars worth of perks? Sure, it's nuts, but people are greedy and selfish, so this happens all the time.
The point is that from a purely technical and mathematical point of view, cloud loses every time except perhaps for the most ephemeral of uses.
I think you're looking at the problem with some incorrect assumptions. First, Amazon wants us to believe that people who can run things in AWS are just too dumb to be admins.