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

tuananh.net

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

#131

Post by devin »

paxys wrote: post #125

I was thinking about this recently. I work at a large company with untold millions in AWS spend. I'm 100% confident that I could shave off a few thousands (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands) from the bill with a little bit of effort on my side. If I go up the management chain and ask if (1) I can make this an official project and put it on the roadmap or (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the…

Unfortunately it seems like businesses only wake up and asks for cost reduction on the infrastructure spend side once the problem is out of control. At that point, the level of operations effort to get it under control feels more like a "big rewrite" than a collection of small tweaks.

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

#133

Post by mlsu »

paxys wrote: post #125

I was thinking about this recently. I work at a large company with untold millions in AWS spend. I'm 100% confident that I could shave off a few thousands (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands) from the bill with a little bit of effort on my side. If I go up the management chain and ask if (1) I can make this an official project and put it on the roadmap or (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the…

Maybe there should be a sort of "anti-saas-sales" role: you get commission on whatever costs you're able to justify as superfluous. After all, the person at AWS makes commission selling you the stuff.

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

#134

Post by mullingitover »

paxys wrote: post #125

I was thinking about this recently. I work at a large company with untold millions in AWS spend. I'm 100% confident that I could shave off a few thousands (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands) from the bill with a little bit of effort on my side. If I go up the management chain and ask if (1) I can make this an official project and put it on the roadmap or (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the…

If your company has a spending commitment with AWS in order to get a few percent savings, and it's just barely hitting the contracted amount, it may not be worth the effort to pursue any cost savings. Suppose your company has committed to hit 5M in spend, and they're just barely inching over the line at 5.01M. You might spend a bunch of time and labor expense knocking it down to 4M of usage and not really move the bottom line at all.

> (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the savings for myself as a reward

This is a textbook case of perverse incentives.

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

#135

Post by msmith »

octopoc wrote: post #120

Here's a startup idea: a profiler for infrastructure-as-code that shows how much each line of code is costing per month, instead of showing where the CPU spends most of its time.

https://www.infracost.io/ might do what you're imagining

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

#136

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

paxys wrote: post #125

I was thinking about this recently. I work at a large company with untold millions in AWS spend. I'm 100% confident that I could shave off a few thousands (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands) from the bill with a little bit of effort on my side. If I go up the management chain and ask if (1) I can make this an official project and put it on the roadmap or (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the…

some of us care enough about our craft to do it without the backpatting or the extra money.

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

#137

Post by LunaSea »

marvin wrote: post #80
throwup238 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be getting kickbacks from Amazon for all the work we’ve done for their bottom line.

We kinda do; Amazon puts upwards pressure on US engineering salaries.

What? No? They are behind all major tech companies and notoriously one of the worst employers too.

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

#138

Post by Detrytus »

gurchik wrote: post #71

I recently helped save $150k per year by deleting node_modules. I noticed that one of our S3 buckets had high data transfer costs, a bucket that our app downloads HTML+JS assets from when we push out a new release. I downloaded the "directory" of files for our latest release and saw it was mostly node_modules. I checked the code and confirmed that, yes, if this file exists in the bucket then it'll be downloaded by th…

Now, the inconvenient question: how much of that $1m savings ended up in your bank account as a bonus? Because certainly some of it should :-D

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

#139

Post by belter »

joshstrange wrote: post #122
belter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are aware of this? - https://calculator.aws/

I’m very aware of that tool but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spec’d things out on that then seen very different prices when I actually create things in AWS. In part because the tool doesn’t take some things into account or because sometimes it’s impossible to guess your usage for a new feature. I don’t believe the VPC was factored in when I used that calculator, even after selecting RDS Proxy.

VPCs are free. Are you talking about data transfer? I know it has options to enter values like amount of data transfer you are planning to do.

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

#140

Post by killingtime74 »

paxys wrote: post #125

I was thinking about this recently. I work at a large company with untold millions in AWS spend. I'm 100% confident that I could shave off a few thousands (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands) from the bill with a little bit of effort on my side. If I go up the management chain and ask if (1) I can make this an official project and put it on the roadmap or (2) I can do this on my own time and keep some % of the…

Not a commission but don't you have performance reviews? Promotion boards? Surely it can count for a bit, if the effort is as little as you say.
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