Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by DrNemski » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 1:22 AM UTC

There's no one silver bullet, as always, you just have to get really good at using Cost Explorer.

Project 1: We reduced our EC2 bill by about $10k a month by moving to spot instances for our Continuous Integration servers

Project 2: We saved another $10k a month by moving to CloudFront for our downloads, instead of using S3 directly

Project 3: Finding and eliminating waste from years of tech debt. Saved $5k a month so far.

As we go we need to spend more and more time to find the same amount of cost savings, it's a law of diminishing returns.

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

#52

Post by primax » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 1:54 AM UTC

ebrewste wrote: post #24

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 dat…

This is one of the ways to use AWS 'the right way'. Without serious optimization, using AWS as a IaaS provider is going to cost more.

AWS provides a ton of building block primitives you can use to build with at a price point better than you can do it yourself. If you just try to do it yourself using their IaaS offerings 24/7 (ec2, vpc, etc) then you're in for a bad time.

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

#53

Post by xstartup » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

Have a clear retention policy. You must differentiate between hot and cold data, it will help you minimize the size and thus cost of your high-performance cluster and the lower performance one.

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

#54

Post by primax » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

I'm a consultant in AWS, mainly doing cost optimization.

My favorite that most people miss is the S3 VPC endpoint. Putting an S3 endpoint in your VPC gives any traffic to S3 it's own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic. I've seen several reductions in the 20-50k a month range with this one trick.

Otherwise, stop doing baremetal processes on the cloud. It's dumb. For instance, I see people operating a file gateway server (with 5 figure a year licensing costs) on ec2 using EBS storage. This is a perfect use case for replacement with S3, with lambda code running in response to whatever file gateway event you're monitoring.

Lastly, you need to really challenge people's conceptions about when resources need to be in use. Does a dev/test site need to be running the 16 hours that people are not at work? Of course not, except when people are staying late. So you create incentives to turn it off, or you run it on something like ECS or kubernetes with software to stop containers if they're not actively used in a 15 minute window (and then the cluster can scale down).

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

#55

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 3:13 AM UTC

primax wrote: post #54

I'm a consultant in AWS, mainly doing cost optimization. My favorite that most people miss is the S3 VPC endpoint. Putting an S3 endpoint in your VPC gives any traffic to S3 it's own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic. I've seen several reductions in the 20-50k a month range with this one trick. Otherwise, stop doing baremetal processes on the cloud. It's dumb. For instance, I see people operating…

Great post. Something I’d add is if you can use tags and reporting to incur chargeback pain in internal budgets, it’s a great motivator to not waste internal resources. We’ve saved six figures a month in AWS spend by doing this.

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

#56

Post by gtz99 » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

You may want to check out FittedCloud (www.fittedcloud.com). It identifies potential cost savings opportunities using machine learning and provide optimization recommendations in form of actionable advisories for most of the AWS resources. Actionable advisories are one click to automation for the provided recommendation. They have a free version with limited capabilities and a paid version for full capabilities.

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

#57

Post by D3m0lish » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

- For consumer compute consider serverless (api gateway and lambda) - this addresses the problem of idle/pre-prod environments. - Data at rest: consider s3, retention policies and glacier. - Consider aggressive retention policies on cloudwatch logs, watch out for unnecessary cloudwatch metrics (I still prefer statsd because of the percentiles) - If you use Kinesis - monitor In/Out bytes and provision shards as needed, control retention. - Watch out for cross region/hybrid (on prem) stacks - data transfer is very expensive and not obvious. - Use reserved instances. - Remove unused EBS volumes. - Watch out for high IO EBS volumes. - Use Cloudfront to cache static content.

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

#58

Post by a012 » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:50 AM UTC

kawera wrote: post #46

mottomotto wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like his summary however, on the low end, I found OVH is more affordable than DigitalOcean depending on your needs. Digital Ocean is $20/month for 2 GB of RAM while OVH is $28/month for 7 GB with roughly similar specs for the rest (SSD, etc). Note that OVH also offers VPS SSD with 8 GB for $13.50/month however it doesn't automatically renew (at least in Canadian region) so you have to manually pay your bill each mo…

On the low end, Linode is also an option: 2GB/$10.

Don't forget Vultr

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

#59

Post by a012 » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:56 AM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #31

For RDS, it is much cheaper to pay for more storage than more IOPS, at least if you are under 3k IOPS. IE, you will save a bundle if you are currently buying 3k provisioned IOPS vs just paying for 1 TB of storage. More here: http://blog.textit.in/why-buying-provisioned-iops-on-rds-may...

It's for EBS in general, if your application is not IOPS intensive, use large gp2 volumes instead. We've had stress test wrong and chose provisioned volumes then have it to revert back to general volumes when in production.

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

#60

Post by usgroup » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:33 AM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #32

The HFT Guy has a good blog and did some posts on this. Basically Google Cloud is much cheaper than AWS so you should look at that. There are also other alternatives including IBM SoftLayer which I've never looked at before. "Run an entire tech company in the cloud, or run only a single [big] project requiring more than 10 servers? Google Compute Engine Run less than 10 servers, for as little cost as possible? Digita…

Cutting out idle time is where you'll make the saving. So use lambada and emr where appropriate. Use spot by default.