Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#11

Post by pelasaco »

petargyurov wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm missing the point, but why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model. Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised. > optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms > ...then it's passed to a human that…

imagine companies where all new products are being deployed on AWS, and for every new project, you submit the suggested AWS infrastructure to them for an evaluation.

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#12

Post by stunt »

petargyurov wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm missing the point, but why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model. Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised. > optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms > ...then it's passed to a human that…

I guess many companies just have so much room to save on their AWS bills. So the service quickly pays for itself. It's fine to keep the subscription at least for a while and maybe later switch to periodically model if the only feature it offers is saving.

But usually it's also about visibility. Services like CloudHealth give you much better billing overview than what AWS gives you. Without that data you may have a lot of blind spots and budget management is much harder. I think the long term value is billing visibility even for companies with good AWS experts.

I think the math behind saving algorithms isn't too complicated. It's just hard to get it around your head specially when you have too many resources. So it's not practical to do it without these tools.

You will be surprised how much inefficiency developers can produce. Especially with infrastructure as code it's just too easy to create oversized resources and forget about them.

Many companies also have a lot of inefficiency with their architecture. So it makes sense to outsource savings on EC2 instances to a service like this and let your internal talents to focus on architecture optimizations where you can probably even save more money.

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#13

Post by MaxBarraclough »

Related reading: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost? (2017) [0]

The top comment is great. Two easy wins:

* Putting an S3 endpoint in your VPC gives any traffic to S3 its own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic. (It's curious that this isn't the default.)

* Auto-shutdown your test servers overnight and on the weekends

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587627

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#14

Post by Thristle »

musicale wrote: post #3

If it works then I would expect Amazon to acquire it so they can break it.

There are so many cost optimization (recommendation or actual) companies and as far as i know none were bought by aws. Azure bought 1 company and used that to allow their cost management to connect and show AWS cost information. other then that, nothing.

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#15

Post by Thristle »

as far as i can tell from the website this is mostly about converting workflows to RIs. what about right sizing or underutilized instances? do you need read permissions from cloudwatch to look at CPU/memory utilization or just the cost and usage report?

I work at a company that started from cost optimization but now offers a platform to manage the customers cloud operations and i only have 1 suggestion - be very upfront about the permissions/data needed for Usage to do it's job. you don't want to start a demo with a big/enterprise client only to find out your permission needs are way beyond what is allowed in that company for outside services

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#18

Post by kavehkhorram »

petargyurov wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm missing the point, but why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model. Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised. > optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms > ...then it's passed to a human that…

Hi petargyurov, great question!

Every recommendation is first produced by a model. Then for a recommendation, we add a human to the cycle that understands the client's infrastructure and adjusts the confidence score accordingly. The savings are then shown on a user's dashboard - alongside an analysis report.

When we onboard a new customer, we spend time understanding their infrastructure plans. Then we keep that information for our human-in-the-loop.

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#19

Post by kavehkhorram »

Thristle wrote: post #15

as far as i can tell from the website this is mostly about converting workflows to RIs. what about right sizing or underutilized instances? do you need read permissions from cloudwatch to look at CPU/memory utilization or just the cost and usage report? I work at a company that started from cost optimization but now offers a platform to manage the customers cloud operations and i only have 1 suggestion - be very upfr…

Hi Thristle,

We're more than just RIs. We also offer Savings Plans, Rightsizing, and Spot Fleet management.

Our permissions include CPU, network, and memory logs. We can scale permissions back on a customer-by-customer basis, though (as we have in the past).

Post reply on HN