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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 subscrip

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 manually verifies each recommendation for correctness So how much of the heavy lifting is actually done by the algorithms?

pelasaco 6y ago
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.
- kavehkhorram 6y ago
  That's the vision :)
stunt 6y ago
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.
- kavehkhorram 6y ago
  You hit it right on the head, stunt!
kavehkhorram 6y ago
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.
- oars 6y ago
  You missed the first question: > 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 This is something I am curious about as well.
  - kavehkhorram 6y ago
    Our recommendations break into two categories: 1. Annual recommendations (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) Sure, if a company only wants these recommendations - they can bring on a contractor once per year to do these changes. This is the one-off fee type contractor the poster is talking about 2. Continuous recommendations (Rightsizing, Spot Management) These recommendations are typically not something you could do once and be done. Rightsizing (which includes zombie instance detection) can happen through time. Spot Fleet management is also a continuous play - spot prices fluctuate and Usage's strategy works hard to maximize savings while minimizing downtime. You might ask, how does this compare to hiring a contractor full time? If you're a midsized company, Usage charges $5k/month (or $60k/year). A fulltime contractor in SV would likely be at least $100k/year and that doesn't factor in the number of billable hours (through interviewing) it would take to find someone who knows 50%+ of all of AWS' features.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mtnGoat 6y ago
      I don't agree with that cost comparison. I don't think you need a full time contractor for this, maybe just someone you pay to check things out for an hour or two per month. This is a task any reasonable skilled sysad or devops lead should be on top of as part of their daily work. I'd say managing our large(high 5 figures monthly) account takes less then two hours per month to audit.

pelasaco 6y ago

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.

kavehkhorram 6y ago
That's the vision :)

stunt 6y ago

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.

kavehkhorram 6y ago
You hit it right on the head, stunt!

kavehkhorram 6y ago

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.

oars 6y ago
You missed the first question: > 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 This is something I am curious about as well.
- kavehkhorram 6y ago
  Our recommendations break into two categories: 1. Annual recommendations (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) Sure, if a company only wants these recommendations - they can bring on a contractor once per year to do these changes. This is the one-off fee type contractor the poster is talking about 2. Continuous recommendations (Rightsizing, Spot Management) These recommendations are typically not something you could do once and be done. Rightsizing (which includes zombie instance detection) can happen through time. Spot Fleet management is also a continuous play - spot prices fluctuate and Usage's strategy works hard to maximize savings while minimizing downtime. You might ask, how does this compare to hiring a contractor full time? If you're a midsized company, Usage charges $5k/month (or $60k/year). A fulltime contractor in SV would likely be at least $100k/year and that doesn't factor in the number of billable hours (through interviewing) it would take to find someone who knows 50%+ of all of AWS' features.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mtnGoat 6y ago
    I don't agree with that cost comparison. I don't think you need a full time contractor for this, maybe just someone you pay to check things out for an hour or two per month. This is a task any reasonable skilled sysad or devops lead should be on top of as part of their daily work. I'd say managing our large(high 5 figures monthly) account takes less then two hours per month to audit.