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Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#21

Post by sofaofthedamned »

I use AWS and online.net. I use the latter for 8 core bare metal servers that cost me 16euro a month. AWS for the rest (at work)

We need a couple of things:

1. A nice easy way to distribute load through cheap bare metal providers with peak load taken by cloud. Kubernetes is nearly there.

2. Somebody to build a LCD display that sits in the office and shows the projected cost for cloud deployment at current usage. It's so easy to throw up a 40 node cluster and not think about the cost - especially where I currently work, a government funded project, where the taxpayer will pony up.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#24

Post by ebrewste »

We stopped storing our IoT raw data in databases. We still need to search it, but now we store only metadata in the database (we know what we will search by, so we can make appropriate metadata) and store the raw data in S3. So any searches are in the DB, using the DB for what it is good at. This means that our storage / database cost approaches just the S3 cost, because our metadata is ~0.001 the size of the raw data. It took our product from "we are going to shut this thing down" to making money.

Got the idea from an AWS talk here https://youtu.be/7Px5g6wLW2A. Blew my mind. I coded up all the changes in a day. Took way longer to move the data than to code it.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#26

Post by PebblesHD »

After cleaning up all our unneeded instances and optimising our architecture, we finally realised that our developer stacks and test environments didn’t need to run 24/7, which has so far been the biggest single cost saving we’ve implemented. By only running stacks from 8am-8pm then stopping everything, we’re getting a 50% saving on our instance costs. If a developer needs a stack they can still launch a new one or start their existing one. We also moved a few test stacks to use single AZ modes instead of multi AZ for another significant saving.

Dialing down our snapshots in non production environments was also a great help to cut our costs.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#27

Post by otakucode »

This is totally just an idea, and not something I have ever seen put into practice (not worked anywhere that used AWS), but depending on your expense, hiring someone who is specifically skilled at objective performance measurement and optimization could pay for itself I would imagine.
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