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Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.

What a baffling comment. Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service? You started with one problem and now you have at least two? And what kind of perverse incentive are you creating? Don't you think your "finops" person has a vested interest in preserving their job by ensuring billing complexity will always be there?

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> Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service?

Absolutely. This was common for complicated services like telecom/long distance even in the pre-cloud days. Big companies would have a staff or hire a service to review telecom bills and make sure they weren’t overpaying.

Paradoxically you are both right. Yes, the situation seems dystopian. Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.

> Yes, hiring a finops person is a sound advice once your cloud bill gets big enough.

Is it, though? At best someone wearing that hat will explain the bill you're getting. What value do you get from that?

To cut costs, either you microoptimize things, of you redesign systems to shed expenses. The former gets you nothing, the latter is not something a "finops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) brings to the table.

You need to know what to optimise which means you need to know what you are spending on.

I did say it applies IFF and only IFF you choose to use these services, and if you have chosen to use these services you have presumably decided they are good value for money. If not, why are they using AWS.

Of course the complexity and extra cost of managing the billing is something that someone who has chosen to use AWS has already factored in, right?

The alternative is to not use AWS.

> IFF and only IFF

If and only if and only if and only if? :)

(also, while on the topic, I think a simple "if" covers it here, since the relationship is not bidirectional)

If the cost of hiring the finops person is less than the savings over operating without one then you hire one, if it isn't then you don't.

It's not baffling. They know what they are getting billed for, that's transparent. They don't understand WHY they are getting billed 6x of what they expected. The problem here isn't with AWS, the problem is they don't understand why their usage is at 6x.

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