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

tuananh.net

31–40 of 194 posts

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

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get paid the same whether or not I spend time going around to save company cost, it’s not like they’re going to share their savings, then shareholders get their juice, management gets their juice and Im the clown who went out of my way for them, who cares I do software not cost management

Which is why your slice of the organization gets a cloud budget. Don't keep your budget under control, well no bonuses for the employees. >Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

Jokes on corporate, I don’t have ISO, RSU, or a bonus and my raises are always below inflation.

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

#34
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get paid the same whether or not I spend time going around to save company cost, it’s not like they’re going to share their savings, then shareholders get their juice, management gets their juice and Im the clown who went out of my way for them, who cares I do software not cost management

Which is why your slice of the organization gets a cloud budget. Don't keep your budget under control, well no bonuses for the employees. >Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

But bonuses are not related to the cloud costs.

Nobody in engineering cares about spending because there is no benefits on doing so.

Even more: most people are on fixed salary and will get paycheck anyway no matter how low their effort is.

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

#35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why your slice of the organization gets a cloud budget. Don't keep your budget under control, well no bonuses for the employees. >Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

Jokes on corporate, I don’t have ISO, RSU, or a bonus and my raises are always below inflation.

Oh for the inflation thats awesome, you know how many interviews with engineers Ive had saying they were at a place for 10 years, but the company had a raise cap of 2%, then saying that they wouldn’t hire me because I couldn’t give assurances to be a likeminded clown making corporate rich

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

#38
post #14

This is especially easy if you can shutdown environments that are only used for dev/staging tasks. With 168 hours in a week - how many hours do those things need to be running? I run a little tool for Heroku to make it easy to do this kinda thing.

Often the continous use discounts make regularly turning on and off a wash.

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

#39
> You go home. So you shut things down.

Sorry for the rant, but this is usually wrong. The amount of people that just keeps their computer on is noticeable. And when I ask it's usually "just to avoid having to wait" or "I've always done that".

I personally always hibernate my computer. When I turn it off it takes more time, but I'm already on the other side of the building so I don't care. When I turn it on it takes basically the same amount of time, and it is exactly as I left it. People keep the computer on just because convenience...and I don't think it's a good thing.

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

#40

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…

I think "engineer" isn't really the correct word to use for the artisans who build much of the tooling used by most companies.

An engineer either wears a striped hat and drives a train, or, went to a credentialed school and passed a bunch of test and is allowed to sign documents that state "this thing, if built this way, won't collapse and kill people."

It is expected that an engineer can predict with reasonable accuracy the expense and timeline of a project, and how to maintain the resulting thing, without resorting to voodoo like "scrum velocity." In large part that's because engineers stick to doing things that are well understood and predictable, and if there's risk they resolve the risk before undertaking the project. (Is there bedrock over here upon which to build a foundation? I don't know; let's find out first!). Sure, there are engineering disasters even today -- buildings that unexpectedly lean over and door/wall things that unexpectedly fly off the side of airplanes, but those are typically organizational / process problems not "engineering doesn't work" problems.

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