epberry

Cool to see Vantage mentioned here! I work for them, mainly on the ec2instances.info site.

https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/ has many details on how our RI management program works. We recently added Autopilot Controls which lets you specify categories of instances (like c5) or regions that you want managed.

One note on buybacks: they are usually capped. I believe most providers cap their "guarantee" around $20K.

Good observation. I wonder if this is a reason the TV adaptations have been tough. Plot seems best enjoyed in written form whereas world building shines on screen.

> Not providing observability to monitor and reduce costs

Vantage just launched this - https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-snowflake-suppo.... The problems the author describes are almost exactly what we heard from customers:

- list of users/queries that are the most expensive

- alerts and notifications for costs

- query timeout. Not something a third party can do but there is an interesting 'query tagging' feature for snowflake which Vantage supports.

I've thought https://www.scrapingbee.com/ looked great, especially their auto rotation of IP addresses.

I have personally enjoyed the Yale Online courses tremendously: https://oyc.yale.edu/

My favorites are RLST 152 (Intro to the New Testament), ITAL 310 (Dante in Translation) and HIST 210 (The Early Middle Ages).

The R2 vs S3 story is pretty interesting. For archival use cases, S3 still wins by a mile, but for running apps, R2 often wins (minus lacking features).

I wrote up my findings here: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison

My understanding is that you can now have TLS compatibility with all google products through https://pki.goog/

Tweet where I saw this: https://twitter.com/rmhrisk/status/1552357227301744640

AWS Organizations are actually quite good for this. There's a "consolidated billing" function which puts everything under the same umbrella.

There’s a hidden part of Aspect that is very functional, with some rough edges: https://sites.aspect.app

I host 2 sites there:

- https://everettberry.com

- https://prcvlabs.org

I’ve found it quite nice for maintaining static sites which I update once a month or so.

Agree. And likewise it seems Twitter is going to court to collect the breakup fee rather than complete the deal.

Surprising to see a company claim massive cost savings for moving _off_ the cloud.

But perhaps they're talking about engineering velocity, reliability, etc. Of course everyone knows Dropbox's story with this: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse...

That's a nice use-case with HashiCorp and complying with country-specific regulations.

I've been enjoying https://daily.dev. The way they integrate into the browser is quite nice too. Well built all around.

Coinbase has been slipping in several ways.

- Yesterday was onboarding my friend to Coinbase wallet and the landing page for that product was 404'ing. This is the first result on Google! Proof - https://imgur.com/yMt1N49

- They activated the dapp browser in the app, with a new wallet that's different than my existing coinbase wallet. Why?? Why do I now have 2 wallets.

- Coinbase direct deposit does not work with Gusto, or at least it didn't 3 months ago. Tried and got silent error.

- Rescinding offers. Terrible, how could they not forsee a massive backlash? Does the foreign national new grad who was counting on that offer/visa really affect the bottom line so much? Maybe $20M for a superbowl ad where the app crashed wasn't worth it?

- Coinbase wallet: popular projects like Chain Runners do not even display.

I mean the list goes on. Meanwhile the CEO is going on Good Time Show talking about "how we built this" and I'm thinking hello? Your own house is on fire right now. All this said, Brian Armstrong is a legendary entrepreneur and I know that he can reset. Airbnb went through a similar phase before the CEO made changes and got them back to their core.

DZone is like this, with different Zones and then with tags that get pretty specific. https://dzone.com/cloud-computing-tutorials-tools-news

This actually seems like a great strategy.

Regarding bandwidth costs, there are new AWS services with much better pricing. I just happened to write about this here, https://www.vantage.sh/blog/nat-gateway-vpc-endpoint-savings

Database as a Service (DBaaS) is probably the one that will affect most developers. Aurora, PlanetScale, Cockroach, MongoDB Atlas, Yugabyte, ClickHouse Cloud, Materialized, Timescale... there are dozens of fully managed dbs now that abstract away some of the most difficult problems of managing your own clusters.

On the more technical side, I agree with brad0's list, especially incremental view maintenance.

I love Arctype. Time-to-visualization is one of its best features. You can go from a CSV to SQL query to shareable chart in like 3 clicks. Also the focus on fully offline usage is a nice change of pace.

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Let me take your questions:

1. Do we have stats on liquidity in the RI marketplace (paraphrasing). Yes we do! We know that some instance types are more liquid than others and factor that into the Autopilot algorithm.

2. Does 50% account for risks? It does. We profile peaks and valleys in usage on a per compute class basis and always ensure that our RI coverage is optimally covering those peaks and valleys without running the risk of over-commitment. If there is a significant delta between peak and valley, we may make a lower RI commitment for that compute class to decrease risk. The specific coverage and savings rates are ultimately dependent on the usage by compute class which is different for each customer.

3. SOC2 timeline? We're expecting this before the end of the year.

4. Take into account existing RIs and SPs? Yes we do. The Autopilot dashboard will show you how much coverage you already have. And then here's a specific docs link with more details on this https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/#i-have-existing-aws-savin...

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Using their committed use discount mechanism is definitely on our radar. We just rolled out Google Cloud support earlier this year https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-google-cloud-su...

The automatic routing via Rails is very cool. I may try to work that up in Django as well.

The OG poster website is actually a Stripe alternative. They also call out Chargebee which is another alternative that should support this.

Usage based billing is not only hard to implement but hard to consume. No one really knows what they are spending and how much particular customers or products cost. I did a writeup a week ago on CDNs and ended up spending several hours in spreadsheets.

I had felt this pain vaguely before but actually seeing it everyday at my current job makes me realize there are engineers suffering on both sides of software billing.

Best kind of error message.

I just want to say that I love Aspect. I have 3 projects on here, 2 of which are live: https://everettberry.com/ and https://prcvlabs.org/.

Seems it's a good time to step away. Come back in a year with a less crazy market and mind.

Ones that save you money: https://vantage.sh and https://mainstreet.com are ones I've used.

https://www.osohq.com/ is a very interesting company in this space. They have an open source authorization library, and a great blog.

Forced myself to look people in the eye when talking to them. Horrifying at first but now slightly less miserable.