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Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

tuananh.net

11–20 of 194 posts

Re: Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

#15
It is interesting to note that the author works at VPBank, which is one of the larger Vietnamese banks. Saving $150k per year on an AWS bill, is really nothing to them.

The fact that they even outsource their compute to AWS is kind of surprising when they could just fill up their existing data centers (like VNTT https://vntt.com.vn/) with equipment, and save a whole lot more money.

Re: Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

#16
It is unfortunate that cost management isn’t something most engineers keep an eye out for on a regular basis. Spinning up unnecessary resources, not cleaning up resources properly once not needed, writing inefficient code, etc. all quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in big companies.

I once found a “test” db cluster from an engineer who hadn’t worked in the company for 3 years. We were paying 300k yearly for it before discounts. It took me a literal click to shut it down. And I’m not proud of it but, had to send out an org wide email on the savings achieved (corporate politics :shrug:).

Re: Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

#18

It is unfortunate that cost management isn’t something most engineers keep an eye out for on a regular basis. Spinning up unnecessary resources, not cleaning up resources properly once not needed, writing inefficient code, etc. all quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in big companies. I once found a “test” db cluster from an engineer who hadn’t worked in the company for 3 years. We were payi…

that's one of the main reason we made this feature "opt-out".

if you want to keep it up, you have to tag it.

once you tag it, it can opt-out 7 days. then you have to extend it (simply chat with our bot)

Re: Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

#19
post #18

It is unfortunate that cost management isn’t something most engineers keep an eye out for on a regular basis. Spinning up unnecessary resources, not cleaning up resources properly once not needed, writing inefficient code, etc. all quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in big companies. I once found a “test” db cluster from an engineer who hadn’t worked in the company for 3 years. We were payi…

that's one of the main reason we made this feature "opt-out". if you want to keep it up, you have to tag it. once you tag it, it can opt-out 7 days. then you have to extend it (simply chat with our bot)

https://cloudcustodian.io

Create a rule and shame them on Slack.

Re: Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off

#20
I worked adjacent some telecom consultants in the 90s whose income was solely driven by a percentage of cost savings they could trim from telephone bills. Seemed like a very brash business model but they clearly knew there was gold to be mined.

I keep thinking I should be doing "cloud optimization" work and being compensated this way. Slicing and dicing output from usage/billing APIs and providing an "optimized spend" probably has the potential for a lot of low hanging fruit.

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