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Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
91–100 of 134 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So claiming that cloud providers are not good The statement is not that AWS is "not good". The statement is that AWS is very expensive, specially for computational tasks, and there are cheaper alternatives around. AWS is notorious for positioning their services as a way to convert capex into opex, specially if your scenario involves a SaaS that might experience unexpected growth and must be globally available. Trai…
I never defended AWS as being the absolute best. I said high bills are almost always due to developers and not the cloud provider. Which you haven’t argued against. As I said I have examples of how Developers often cause large bills. And I explained why we can’t help with the OPs large bill. You’re saying that with ML there is absolutely 0 way to reduce costs on AWS which is absolute rubbish.
> I said high bills are almost always due to developers and not the cloud provider.
I feel that's where you keep missing the whole point. Somehow you're stuck on thinking that an expensive service is not a problem if you can waste time micromanaging and constantly monitoring expenditures to shave off a bit of cost from the invoice. Yet, somehow you don't register in your universe the fact that there are services out there that are both far cheaper and arguably better for this use case.
Therefore, why do you keep insisting on the idea of wasting time and effort micromanaging a deployment like pets to shave off some trimmings off a huge invoice if all you need to do to cut cost to a fraction of AWS's price tag is to.... switch vendor?
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#93I was in same situation. We bough 2 Dell servers via their financing program. Each server is about 19-25K. We paid AWS $60K per month before that. We pay $600 for co-location. So my advice is try to get hardware via financing of provider Dell had a good program I think.
this is good advice-- you can run those boxes into the ground for five years and easily get paid back
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#94Post your bill. You often have unexpected charges for ingress or services you are unaware
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#95The answer is simple: don't use AWS. You will never get out of this hole unless you move from AWS, because AWS is not scalable budget-wise.
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#96Don’t overlook the possibility to use your own physical hardware, running high-end commodity graphics cards (2080Ti, Titan RTX), especially for model training. (I haven’t found this to be overly effort or time intensive and the payoff is enormous on a dollars-basis.)
You didn’t give enough details for someone to get really specific. I’m assuming from your text that the issue is inference not training costs, in which case there’s some great advice already posted, but more details might help.
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in the same boat and this is good advice! I stopped using gpu's, "Vectorized inference isn’t bad at all!". This soo much, I was blinded with gpu speed, using tensorflow builds with avx optimization is actually pretty fast. My discovery: + Stop expensive GPU's for inference and switch to avx optimized tensorflow builds. + Cleaned up the inference pipeline and reduced complexity. + Buying compute instance for a y…
Also, consider physical servers from providers like Hetzner. These can be several times cheaper than EC2.
I was just looking at Hetzner yesterday, looking to host a HA Postgres setup.
Their block storage volumes look interesting, but I couldn't find any information on performance guarantees, or even claims.
Anyone have an idea about performance (IOPS or MB/s)?
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#98AWS/clouds aren't always the best solution for a problem. Often they're the worst (just like any other tool). You don't provide a lot of detail but I imagine at this point you need to get "creative" and move at least some aspect of your operation out of AWS. Some variation of: - Buy some hardware and host it at home/office/etc. - Buy some hardware and put it in a colocation facility. - Buy a lot of hardware and put i…
> AWS/clouds aren't always the best solution for a problem. And when they aren’t always the best. It’s often because you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s too uncommon for people to over provision. Or go with too many services when they don’t need to. Like let’s have a database and cache service and search search. When 95% of the time they only need the database because it can do full text searching adequate enough…
Nothing is stopping you from applying all those optimizations to on-premise hardware, right?
That is, I am not sure "public cloud, if you spend lots of effort to optimize it and ask devs to be careful, can be as cheap as a naive on-prem implementation where devs don't need to be careful" is an argument for public cloud.
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#99I‘m a CTO of a compute intensive AI SaaS company, so I can relate. One advice: speak to your AWS rep immediately. Get credits to redesign your system and keep you running. you can expect up to 7 digits in credits (for real!) and support for a year for free, they really want to help you in avoiding this.
This.
AWS has always been eager to get on the phone with me to discuss cost savings strategies. And they don’t upsell you in the process.
Re: Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?
#100AWS/clouds aren't always the best solution for a problem. Often they're the worst (just like any other tool). You don't provide a lot of detail but I imagine at this point you need to get "creative" and move at least some aspect of your operation out of AWS. Some variation of: - Buy some hardware and host it at home/office/etc. - Buy some hardware and put it in a colocation facility. - Buy a lot of hardware and put i…
This should be top voted. Buy the hardware and expect your costs to fall 10x.
There are also more upfront costs (not just monetary), you can't scale quicky, and you lose all the managed solutions that make building things super fast and effective. Your hardware cost may be lower 10x but the operational and developmental cost will be higher as well as a limit on your business to grow.
A balanced approach is to only put the most expensive hardware portion of the business with the smallest availability requirement in colo, and horizontally scale it over time. Simultaneously use a cloud provider to execute on the cheap stuff fast and reliably.