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Definitely not. My company has been drastically scaling back our AWS spend and I mean about a $10m+ a month reduction. I guarantee we're not alone. All the gee-
by pram 7y ago
Definitely not. My company has been drastically scaling back our AWS spend and I mean about a $10m+ a month reduction. I guarantee we're not alone. All the gee-whiz resume-driven-development type project infrastructure was the first to go lol.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jarym 7y agoA $10m/month reduction is quite significant. Question is, was your company spending $10m/month extra unnecessarily or have they had to cut down and go without important things in getting this kind of reduction?
- grey-area 7y agoA reduction in customer numbers means a reduction in the resources required. Many businesses associated with outdoor activities, sports, travel etc etc will be seeing less traffic at the moment. Many business are pretty much closed. This will then severely impact other businesses which sell to those businesses, and so on, all the way up the chain to advertising and cloud providers.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoThe Ubers and Lyft's save by committing to a certain level of spend. They have paid -- might as well use the resources, anyways -- unless they've since negotiated with Amazon.
- cunac 7y agohaving a hard time to see how you scale down 120 mil a year. How much you spend yearly now
- pram 7y agoIt’s probably not for the entire year, a lot of it is just various clusters being scaled back. That said some of the stuff has been moved to colo hardware, and some of it is probably just gone forever.
- itwy 7y agoThe guy is lying, obviously.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tjr225 7y agoMaybe, maybe not. But I think I agree with you- 10m/m is a comically large number(I wonder how many companies spend even 1/100th of that a month on cloud compute?) and I have no reason to believe this person so why would I?
- pram 7y agoCorrect there is no reason to believe me. However for context and perspective our quarterly revenue is usually around $3 billion. $10 million is not comically large. I’m not talking about a startup. hth
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cco 7y agoI'm shocked that some middle manager with half a technical head on their shoulders didn't use this as a VP play before this; surely, "I saved the company 120m a year with no downstream consequences to yada yada" would have been worth it for someone somewhere to climb the ladder.
- markvdb 7y ago
- EmielMols 7y agoFor those wondering as well, at 10b quarterly revenue, 10m monthly is ~.3% of all AWS revenue.
- jrockway 7y agoIt seems likely to me that a recession or pandemic affects more than just the OP's business, so while that one customer is probably meaningless to AWS, the thought process that led to scaling back spending could be meaningful.
- throwawayoverhe 7y agoInterestingly, I had the opposite takeaway. 0.3% of monthly revenue from a single customer's reduced spending only a couple months in to a multi-year recession is pretty alarming. Makes me wonder if OP's company is particularly exposed to retail, travel, or another sector severely impacted by the first order effects of the virus.
- code_duck 7y agoThat sounds like a lot to me for just one customer. But in the absence of much more data about AWS customers and revenue, it's hard to draw any meaningful conclusions.
- unfunco 7y agoAnd here I was pretty proud of myself for reducing our monthly bill from $5K a month to $2K… we have some basic sports data APIs that are hardly being used since there's no live sport being played, so I've removed most of our redundancy for the time being.
- syshum 7y ago"Cloud Scale" always promotes that you can scale up easily, but that also means you can scale down easily
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoWell, that's the marketing story, at least. In my reality, a large part of my programmers' effort is spent battling various "capacity exceeded" AWS errors.
- echelon 7y agoIf you had to do it all over again, would you still choose AWS? Or would you go with another cloud, or perhaps even non-managed bare metal?
- wskinner 7y agoIt's easy to accidentally waste a lot of money on AWS. My company cut our costs from ~20k/month to ~6.5k/month with no degradation of UX or dev velocity. It was all due to unnecessary redundant builds and integration tests and lingering unused resources. We used the CloudForecast service to identify and track costs (https://cloudforecast.io/ https://cloudforecast.io/). An underrated side effect of this service is that making costs visible to the engineers incurring the costs can encourage them to spend less.
- ashtonkem 7y agoMy team reprioritized efficiency over features during the recession, trimming a large amount of unnecessary AWS spend that wasn’t as pressing when the economy was performing well. That specific spend will never come back to AWS, because it was always unnecessary.
- cglace 7y agoI’m sure new unnecessary spending will creep in as time goes on.
- jlg23 7y agoPretty sure a typo and the million wanted to be a kilo? $120m/year for apparently unnecessary IT capacity would be hard to hide even in government contracts...
- chii 7y ago$120m is not ridiculous for a medium to large enterprise. For an engineering team of ~1000, just the build servers will cost about $1-5m a month (depending on what's being done there).
- chickenpotpie 7y ago$1000+/month/per engineer sounds way too high.
- jgalt212 7y agoseriously, that's a very beefy server per engineer, just in cloud resources. not including what they use to do their day to day work. NFW would I allocate such a spends per engineer--maybe for beefy projects/groups, but not for the org as a whole.
- zeckalpha 7y agoDepends on how many engineers you have.
- freepor 7y agoIt’s not just costs incurred by engineers, it’s costs incurred by users. If you’re providing file storage as part of your app, then for every engineer with a dev environment in the cloud, 1000 users could be uploading gigabyte files into your S3 bucket.
- nucleardog 7y agoThat seems... excessive. Let's say we pair engineers up just to make my math a little easier here. One engineer's allotment goes to compute resources, another goes to storage. At the low end, that's a 32 core/128GB RAM build server with 10TB of storage per pair. At the high end, depending which way you spec that out, that's 96 core/385GB RAM with 50TB per pair. What the hell are you guys building?!
- gameswithgo 7y agoWe have had to scale up our AWS spend! And any gee-whiz solutions to improving efficiency and scalability are very welcome right now.
- risyachka 7y agoAt the same time, many entertainment companies are scaling like crazy, spending magnitudes more on clouds.