9 ms·

AWS Cost Saving Recommendations

189 points by jeffbarg 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago
I think this advice is probably the most straightforward suggestion: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/to-save-money-on-your-aws-bill-turn-that-s-off/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/to-save-money-on-your-aws...
marsdepinski 5y ago
Step 1. Stop using AWS.
StratusBen 5y ago
:wave: I'm a Co-Founder at https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ - thanks for posting this, Jeff! I think the biggest call out here is that Vantage Cost Saving Recommendations are profiling not only things like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances but we are also directly integrated with AWS Service APIs that allow us to surface higher-fidelity cost-savings measures on a per AWS service or resource basis. Over time, we will be adding to the suite of checks and recommendations. Also, it's worth calling out that these recommendations are available to all users -- including users in our free tier. I'm happy to answer any questions if folks have them.
- GiorgioG 5y ago
  How did you guys decide on your pricing plans? It seems to me you're missing out on the folks who's spending doesn't vary much per month but want to get their costs optimized. I have a friend who's company is spending ~70k/month on AWS who might be interested in this, but doesn't generally need it on an ongoing basis since their needs are generally fixed.
- dfabulich 5y ago
  Vantage should provide a date saying when exactly the recommendations were computed. This answer from the FAQ kinda sucks. > I am a Vantage user but I don't see any Cost Recommendations. What is happening? > There are two possible things causing this: (1) Vantage has not yet run the process for finding cost recommendations for your account yet and you can check back later (2) your account is well-optimized from an AWS cost perspective and there are no recommendations for you to review. > In either case, Vantage will continue to monitor your AWS account for all changes and be sure to surface Cost Recommendations to you as it finds them. "Maybe we'll provide useful guidance, maybe we won't, but we won't tell you which. Maybe you're perfect. Maybe we never ran an analysis. Maybe we'll run an analysis in the future, maybe not."
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    Thanks for your candid feedback - I agree this is something we should do a better job of surfacing. I've added this to our backlog to improve - feel free to email me and I can let you know when the experience improves. We mention elsewhere in the post that for service and resource level recommendations we do this as often as your Vantage account syncs - which you can initiate at any time from the top navigation bar. For recommendations like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances we are running this process weekly for now but that may change so we will definitely add a timestamp as to when that occurs.
- Thristle 5y ago
  Are these recommendations from the cost & usage report? just normal API queries? If it is just from normal API (probably list instance/lb), is it really enough in order to create proper recommendations? do you have an estimate on the cost/usage you are adding for each scale of customer?
- deevus 5y ago
  I was already able to decommission $160USD a month of infrastructure after 5 minutes on the platform. Thanks! Is it possible to set up a billing email? I would rather not have to forward the invoices every month.
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    That's fantastic! If you email support@vantage.sh we can update the billing email manually now in advance of us launching RBAC for team-members on your Vantage account. Prior to contacting support, please just invite your team-mate to your Vantage account from the account settings page.
jpr5 5y ago
Really digging this product so far. So many times I've set up complicated multi-region service architectures in AWS and will still struggle to produce simple POVs on cost consumption (and credit usage/outlook, for all us startups). This thing is pretty damn straightforward and simple (which is good), and TIL from Vantage that I've been using the wrong volume type - gp3 is better and would save me money. I feel dumb not knowing, but now Vantage made me a little smarter. ;-) Three cheers for the cost savings recommendations!
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  To be honest, this is all the domain of your AWS service advisor. At any type of scale(eg, when you move to invoiced billing because CC billing would be absurd), you should be overwhelmed by phone calls from that individual. While half of their job is to upsell you, the other half is to help you save costs to garner goodwill(and your future business). If you've been dodging these calls in the past, it might be worth picking up the phone.
- Thristle 5y ago
  You shouldn't feel too bad, most companies/people don't know how much money they are wasting on AWS. Moreover, gp3 is very new (in cloud time) and most people don't use it since it's not really supported that well in cloudformation
- nijave 5y ago
  I've heard of some latency issues with gp3 vs gp2--not sure if that's been resolved. Of course, services like RDS don't support it yet, either (same with io2) As for cost consumption, splitting services into separate AWS accounts (even per-environment) helps if they're large (plus then you're less likely to hit rate limits, worry about IAM segregation, etc)
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    I just did a mass conversion of gp2 to gp3. gp3 DOES increase disk latency, but we're talking 2ms -> 4ms. So it's doubled, but still pretty low. For normal usage, it's still quite fast.
boba7 5y ago
By not using AWS I have saved thousands. This one simple trick.
- elforce002 5y ago
  Preach! AWS is overrated.
- cpncrunch 5y ago
  Me too. The data transfer costs would be the killer for me (video conferencing).
- hughrr 5y ago
  Ah yes you're at the fifth level of AWS cost management consciousness. You may have skipped the first four levels. First is the simple test case using something random like Lambda and S3 after dragging through the Whizlabs course. This costs you $5 a month. Second is the migration of something not particularly complicated but a bit meatier which works out cheaper than your capital expenditure coming up so you can write it off without having to fill in a purchase order and argue with accounts again. Third is the overconfident architectural approach of multi-account, multi-AZ with peering all over the shop as recommended in the best practices, certification and architecture documentation. Approving nods all around on delivering this, despite the operational expenditure being slightly higher than predicted on your hacked up and not totally complete Excel spreadsheet for cost management. Fourth is the first bill. This immediately points out your inter-VPC, inter-AZ transit and shitty shared tenancy CPU provision you had to crank up quickly at the last minute, costs more a month than your entire infrastructure capex for 3 years did before you got AWS resulting in sad kitty faces all around and a scramble for a cheaper option while trying not to get fired. This is all while Bezos dances on the flames coming from the dollar bills he's burning in a giant bonfire cackling loudly. Fifth is several months later after being on the job market, eating ramen and searching for a company which "doesn't do any of that cloud stuff". You eventually find a position herding a couple of 1U supermicro boxes with CentOS on them which require the odd disk replacing here and there and some PHP updating without going near Terraform, Jenkins or any of that shit. Your entire infrastructure upgrade is automating your entire job into a few ansible playbooks and spending 6 hours a day inspecting the insides of your eyelids.
gnfargbl 5y ago
I know it isn't for everyone, but if you're seriously trying to save cash and you can handle the trade-off of managing your own infrastructure, Hetzner has AX101s back in stock: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101 https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101. €100/mo for 16 Ryzen 9 cores, 128GB of RAM and 3.84TB of NVMe. Unlimited traffic.
- heipei 5y ago
  Seconded. Every three months I get a little anxious about not running on one of the clouds that would let me scale more quickly (and also would let me do things like use Athena to go through a huge S3 bucket). But then I do a little math and realise that the bandwidth bill from AWS alone would eclipse all of my hosting costs at Hetzner, not to speak of the actual servers running there, and I don't really need fast scaling if I can just provision everything with a nice margin (2x) and still come out way below AWS prices. But it really depends on the nature of your business I suppose.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Bandwidth on AWS has some scary side effects if you're not careful. A former colleague of mine got screwed for this and S3. Backup storage costs? $57 a month. Just the bandwidth fee to do a restore? $450
  - schoolornot 5y ago
    If only deploying Kubernetes was as simple as running a golang up and etcd tolerated some latency, you could spin up a node in AWS, another in Hetzner, and a third in DigitalOcean.
    - pas 5y ago
      Try microk8s.io , it uses dqlite (replicated SQLite + raft leader election; also, yes, it needs 'snap', just let it go, it doesn't matter). Use a fixed version stable channel, because they apparently employ the world's eminent simian scientists to break your cluster on every major update. Even on a test cluster don't be too frugal with RAM. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-kubernetes-ha#3-install-microk8s https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-kubernetes...
rvnx 5y ago
Switch from AWS to Google Cloud to save costs and not have to pay an external service to give you sizing recommendations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rob_c 5y ago
Was hoping there would be more of a numerical comparison to various strategies when scaling and a comparison to other strategies such as say self-hosting :( (aws has a useful place and a use, but obviously spawning a new vm for every query would just maximise cost over time)
SamuelAdams 5y ago
This seems like an ad for vantage more than a cost-savings tutorial. Can anyone talk about what specifically vantage is doing to identify cost-saving areas? Otherwise the title is misleading. Mods, can you update the title to be the actual title of the article?
- StratusBen 5y ago
  For what its worth, the original submission of the post as we saw it was our blog post title of "Vantage Launches AWS Cost Saving Recommendations" and was updated to this presumably by HN mods.
jmann99999 5y ago
I don't know anything about Vantage. It sounds like people have had good luck with them. However, what gets us our greatest savings on AWS are two things. First, we have the luxury of being able to take advantage of Reserved instances. We have decided how much we are wiling to commit on EC2's, RDS, etc. and it saves us 10-30% depending on what we do. Second, and this is perhaps the more interesting one. We started working with an "AWS Advanced Partner." Billing goes through them and that reduces our charges. In addition, they pitch projects of ours to AWS and if they are interesting enough to AWS, AWS reduces charges for periods of time on servers related to those developments. While we use AWS, I think the game is the same with Google or Microsoft. So, if you are looking to save some money, you may look into companies who are Advanced AWS Partners, Premier Google Partners, or Silver Microsoft Partners. It's likely they can help you out.
- nexuist 5y ago
  > In addition, they pitch projects of ours to AWS and if they are interesting enough to AWS, AWS reduces charges for periods of time on servers related to those developments. Is there IP transfer here? They give you a discount in exchange for knowing how you're making money?
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    First taste is free...
  - k__ 5y ago
    I'd say they give them a discount for developing something a customer will then (have to) run on AWS.
  - nrmitchi 5y ago
    I have no evidence, but my suspicion is that programs like this are designed similiarly to large credit grants given to startups. If they see a project that seems "interesting" (ie, has a potentially to be successful and have a very high AWS spend in the future), they're willing to subsidize[0] some costs now in order for you to get used to and build around AWS, and likely build more closely to AWS. If it ends up being successful, AWS has a much larger customer. [0] I say subsidize in quotes because I seriously doubt AWS is taking a loss on any of this, they're just not making quite as much in profit.
KronisLV 5y ago
If you're somewhat poor like me (living in Eastern Europe, current net salary around 1500 euros a month; provides decent quality of life here but not in a globalized economy), then the first step of saving money would be not to bother with the expensive cloud vendors: AWS, Azure and GCP.* * this advice does not apply if you're a cog in an enterprise, then use whatever the company mandates Here's a few alternatives, from the most expensive to the least expensive: DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ A pretty popular VPS provider that i'd say is cheaper than the above to start us out. They also offer a whole bunch of different managed services, if you're into that sort of stuff. Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing Much like DigitalOcean, sans some of the managed services. On the upside, they also sell smaller instances, though those tend to be sold out in my experience. Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ Have a look at their Development or Starburst instances (the latter are smaller ones like Vultr), also they rival DigitalOcean in their managed offerings. Pretty good CPU performance as well, in my experience. Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud I'd say that they're cheaper than all of the above, but also have a reasonably modern control panel, as well as block storage services if you need more space. ID verification might be necessary if you're from an undesireable country, though, so YMMV. Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 I have used them for almost all of my servers in the last 4 years or so (hence affiliate link in case you check them out) - the control panel is somewhat more dated and the managed offerings are limited, but they're one of the cheapest legitimate hosts, since they're owned by a Lithuanian telco. They also offer noticeable discounts if you reserve instances for a year and i'd say they're a good choice for most purposes, provided that you have backups (i have a few backup servers in my home for that purpose). Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ https://contabo.com/en/vps/ Perhaps the best specs that you can get on the cheap, especially if you're after a decent amount of storage, which is larger than most of the other hosts provide you with (in lieu of block storage services). They do have a setup fee for the instances, the process seems at least partially manual on their part, the web UI is the most antiquated i've seen of the bunch, the performance of the instances is mediocre (they probably overprovision), but it all seems to work regardless. There are also other hosts out there, but the shadier they are, the more likely data loss and/or theft is. But hey, balance your needs with your capabilities to find what works the best for you! Perhaps i'll even write a blog post and include some automated benchmarks in the future on my blog. Edit: if you feel like spending some of your time looking for bargains (yaay for low alternative costs), then feel free to have a look at LowEndBox, where interesting deals are sometimes advertised: https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ Personally, however, i'd only pick companies that have been around for $SOME years.
brylie 5y ago
DigitalOcean App Platform is simple and affordable: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/
nijave 5y ago
Maybe this is more advanced, but just going off the screen shot it looks the same as Trusted Advisor https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-adv... If you have Enterprise Support, your TAMs can also help with cost and can arrange meetings and resources to address cost concerns, as well (including architectural reviews) If you're not large enough for that to apply or don't plan for huge growth, personally, I'd strongly reconsider AWS. Amazon's APIs and infrastructure automation can give small teams a lot of leverage to run massive amounts of infrastructure and quickly scale, but things with a small, fixed set of infrastructure might be worth a look on VMs, etc
- Dunedan 5y ago
  > If you're not large enough for that to apply or don't plan for huge growth, personally, I'd strongly reconsider AWS. Amazon's APIs and infrastructure automation can give small teams a lot of leverage to run massive amounts of infrastructure and quickly scale, but things with a small, fixed set of infrastructure might be worth a look on VMs, etc That doesn't make sense to me. Imagine you're paying ~$50,000/month for AWS and make good use of its features (of course if you're just running EC2 instances, using AWS adds little value). While that might sound costly, in my opinion it's still way too little to justify the additional $10,000/month Enterprise Support would cost. Using Enterprise Support would increase the bill by 20% in this case! In my opinion Enterprise Support only makes sense if your monthly AWS bill is close to or more than $150,000/month, as otherwise Enterprise Support is a quite expensive additional item on the bill, or if you require the additional escalation possibilities in case of problems that come with Enterprise Support.
  - nijave 5y ago
    >don't plan for huge growth imo it might make sense at that point to consider other options. AWS definitely isn't cheap and $50k/mon is a lot on infrastructure for "free" support. I don't think AWS Support makes sense at that price (unless you're going to heavily leverage it) but I'm also not sure running $50k infra on AWS makes a lot of sense either
Aeolun 5y ago
Eh, my only experience with Vantage so far has been their apparent purchase and breaking of the ec2instances website.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  Hey there, can you please let me know what you're referring to? We largely haven't touched the site at all other than hosting it on our AWS account which as far as I know didn't impact anything negatively. Additionally, we've built an API for the data served through it: https://vantage.readme.io/reference https://vantage.readme.io/reference We have future plans to develop the site but I just want to ensure I'm aware of what you're referring to if you're seeing something we aren't aware of. Please feel free to email me directly at ben@vantage.sh if you'd like.
freediver 5y ago
Another way to slash cost is to use https://cloudoptimizer.io https://cloudoptimizer.io to locate cheapest cloud resources (disclaimer: my project)
marsdepinski 5y ago
With Amazon and any variable pricing model, there is no limit to how much you will pay. It's a conscious business model decision and a very smart one by Amazon. You want to be smart about costs? Limit your downside risk ie. Fix your costs.
spullara 5y ago
The best way to save AWS costs is to optimize your code. Seen it over and over again at many portfolio companies.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Optimize, and redesign to use AWS features. Just dumping your existing code on EC2 is often a bad idea. We worked with a client and analyzed their workload and software. With a few minor changes we could reduce their always on EC2 instances with 66%. They where not interested. Then at least buy reserved instances? Nope, also not interested.
  - spullara 5y ago
    For sure. And making sure you aren't using them inefficiently. At one point we were using 30% of our AWS spend doing S3 API calls. The next day it was 1% by optimizing that.
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      That's pretty impressive. I'd love to read a write-up about what you changed and how you analysed the problem.
      - meekins 5y ago
        Sounds like optimizing data partition and blob sizes in Athena and/or Glue
    - spullara 5y ago
      We were using S3 as ternary storage for our time series database by moving values from the secondary SSD based storage to S3. Each of those values contained all the values for a full day. By using HTTP range queries and placing an index in the SSD store we were able to combine 30 days of values into a single S3 value to decrease the API PUT calls by 30x.
jasfi 5y ago
Write and use high performance software, you pay for what you use after all. I've been using Nim for some time now, and it gives me that with a syntax comparable to Python.
mfrye0 5y ago
I've been doing some AWS optimization recently. For my setup, which heavily uses a lot of short job based queue patterns, I've had a lot of success with the following: 1) Moving to spot instances where possible 2) Autoscaling rules 3) Reserved instances where possible 4) Moving everything to AWS Graviton based instances I cut the bill by ~70%.
dsincl12 5y ago
Did a quick search and didn't see UpCloud mentioned. Having used AWS, GCP, Azure and DigitalOcean, one of the strong points of UpCloud (except for their pricing and product offerings) have been their customer interaction. Hands down the best experience I've ever had both from support and sales. I reached out to support 2:15AM in their live chat and got my issues resolved as we spoke. Good luck getting that with one of the big companies. https://upcloud.com/ https://upcloud.com/
- jesterson 5y ago
  Never heard of it before and will give a shot. Thank you. Pricing seems to be similar to DigitalOcean, however there seems to be more resources allocated.
- lozf 5y ago
  > I reached out to support 2:15AM in their live chat and got my issues resolved as we spoke. Nice, but time zone matters - depending on where both you and they are based, that could have just been normal 9-5 making it seem better than the reality... Not detracting from the fact that it got resolved promptly of course.

189 points by jeffbarg 5y ago

I think this advice is probably the most straightforward suggestion: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/to-save-money-on-your-aws-bill-turn-that-s-off/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/to-save-money-on-your-aws...

marsdepinski 5y ago

Step 1. Stop using AWS.

StratusBen 5y ago

:wave: I'm a Co-Founder at https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ - thanks for posting this, Jeff! I think the biggest call out here is that Vantage Cost Saving Recommendations are profiling not only things like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances but we are also directly integrated with AWS Service APIs that allow us to surface higher-fidelity cost-savings measures on a per AWS service or resource basis. Over time, we will be adding to the suite of checks and recommendations. Also, it's worth calling out that these recommendations are available to all users -- including users in our free tier. I'm happy to answer any questions if folks have them.

GiorgioG 5y ago
How did you guys decide on your pricing plans? It seems to me you're missing out on the folks who's spending doesn't vary much per month but want to get their costs optimized. I have a friend who's company is spending ~70k/month on AWS who might be interested in this, but doesn't generally need it on an ongoing basis since their needs are generally fixed.
dfabulich 5y ago
Vantage should provide a date saying when exactly the recommendations were computed. This answer from the FAQ kinda sucks. > I am a Vantage user but I don't see any Cost Recommendations. What is happening? > There are two possible things causing this: (1) Vantage has not yet run the process for finding cost recommendations for your account yet and you can check back later (2) your account is well-optimized from an AWS cost perspective and there are no recommendations for you to review. > In either case, Vantage will continue to monitor your AWS account for all changes and be sure to surface Cost Recommendations to you as it finds them. "Maybe we'll provide useful guidance, maybe we won't, but we won't tell you which. Maybe you're perfect. Maybe we never ran an analysis. Maybe we'll run an analysis in the future, maybe not."
- StratusBen 5y ago
  Thanks for your candid feedback - I agree this is something we should do a better job of surfacing. I've added this to our backlog to improve - feel free to email me and I can let you know when the experience improves. We mention elsewhere in the post that for service and resource level recommendations we do this as often as your Vantage account syncs - which you can initiate at any time from the top navigation bar. For recommendations like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances we are running this process weekly for now but that may change so we will definitely add a timestamp as to when that occurs.
Thristle 5y ago
Are these recommendations from the cost & usage report? just normal API queries? If it is just from normal API (probably list instance/lb), is it really enough in order to create proper recommendations? do you have an estimate on the cost/usage you are adding for each scale of customer?
deevus 5y ago
I was already able to decommission $160USD a month of infrastructure after 5 minutes on the platform. Thanks! Is it possible to set up a billing email? I would rather not have to forward the invoices every month.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  That's fantastic! If you email support@vantage.sh we can update the billing email manually now in advance of us launching RBAC for team-members on your Vantage account. Prior to contacting support, please just invite your team-mate to your Vantage account from the account settings page.

jpr5 5y ago

Really digging this product so far. So many times I've set up complicated multi-region service architectures in AWS and will still struggle to produce simple POVs on cost consumption (and credit usage/outlook, for all us startups). This thing is pretty damn straightforward and simple (which is good), and TIL from Vantage that I've been using the wrong volume type - gp3 is better and would save me money. I feel dumb not knowing, but now Vantage made me a little smarter. ;-) Three cheers for the cost savings recommendations!

clipradiowallet 5y ago
To be honest, this is all the domain of your AWS service advisor. At any type of scale(eg, when you move to invoiced billing because CC billing would be absurd), you should be overwhelmed by phone calls from that individual. While half of their job is to upsell you, the other half is to help you save costs to garner goodwill(and your future business). If you've been dodging these calls in the past, it might be worth picking up the phone.
Thristle 5y ago
You shouldn't feel too bad, most companies/people don't know how much money they are wasting on AWS. Moreover, gp3 is very new (in cloud time) and most people don't use it since it's not really supported that well in cloudformation
nijave 5y ago
I've heard of some latency issues with gp3 vs gp2--not sure if that's been resolved. Of course, services like RDS don't support it yet, either (same with io2) As for cost consumption, splitting services into separate AWS accounts (even per-environment) helps if they're large (plus then you're less likely to hit rate limits, worry about IAM segregation, etc)
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  I just did a mass conversion of gp2 to gp3. gp3 DOES increase disk latency, but we're talking 2ms -> 4ms. So it's doubled, but still pretty low. For normal usage, it's still quite fast.

boba7 5y ago

By not using AWS I have saved thousands. This one simple trick.

elforce002 5y ago
Preach! AWS is overrated.
cpncrunch 5y ago
Me too. The data transfer costs would be the killer for me (video conferencing).
hughrr 5y ago
Ah yes you're at the fifth level of AWS cost management consciousness. You may have skipped the first four levels. First is the simple test case using something random like Lambda and S3 after dragging through the Whizlabs course. This costs you $5 a month. Second is the migration of something not particularly complicated but a bit meatier which works out cheaper than your capital expenditure coming up so you can write it off without having to fill in a purchase order and argue with accounts again. Third is the overconfident architectural approach of multi-account, multi-AZ with peering all over the shop as recommended in the best practices, certification and architecture documentation. Approving nods all around on delivering this, despite the operational expenditure being slightly higher than predicted on your hacked up and not totally complete Excel spreadsheet for cost management. Fourth is the first bill. This immediately points out your inter-VPC, inter-AZ transit and shitty shared tenancy CPU provision you had to crank up quickly at the last minute, costs more a month than your entire infrastructure capex for 3 years did before you got AWS resulting in sad kitty faces all around and a scramble for a cheaper option while trying not to get fired. This is all while Bezos dances on the flames coming from the dollar bills he's burning in a giant bonfire cackling loudly. Fifth is several months later after being on the job market, eating ramen and searching for a company which "doesn't do any of that cloud stuff". You eventually find a position herding a couple of 1U supermicro boxes with CentOS on them which require the odd disk replacing here and there and some PHP updating without going near Terraform, Jenkins or any of that shit. Your entire infrastructure upgrade is automating your entire job into a few ansible playbooks and spending 6 hours a day inspecting the insides of your eyelids.

gnfargbl 5y ago

I know it isn't for everyone, but if you're seriously trying to save cash and you can handle the trade-off of managing your own infrastructure, Hetzner has AX101s back in stock: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101 https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101. €100/mo for 16 Ryzen 9 cores, 128GB of RAM and 3.84TB of NVMe. Unlimited traffic.

heipei 5y ago
Seconded. Every three months I get a little anxious about not running on one of the clouds that would let me scale more quickly (and also would let me do things like use Athena to go through a huge S3 bucket). But then I do a little math and realise that the bandwidth bill from AWS alone would eclipse all of my hosting costs at Hetzner, not to speak of the actual servers running there, and I don't really need fast scaling if I can just provision everything with a nice margin (2x) and still come out way below AWS prices. But it really depends on the nature of your business I suppose.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Bandwidth on AWS has some scary side effects if you're not careful. A former colleague of mine got screwed for this and S3. Backup storage costs? $57 a month. Just the bandwidth fee to do a restore? $450
- schoolornot 5y ago
  If only deploying Kubernetes was as simple as running a golang up and etcd tolerated some latency, you could spin up a node in AWS, another in Hetzner, and a third in DigitalOcean.
  - pas 5y ago
    Try microk8s.io , it uses dqlite (replicated SQLite + raft leader election; also, yes, it needs 'snap', just let it go, it doesn't matter). Use a fixed version stable channel, because they apparently employ the world's eminent simian scientists to break your cluster on every major update. Even on a test cluster don't be too frugal with RAM. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-kubernetes-ha#3-install-microk8s https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-kubernetes...

rvnx 5y ago

Switch from AWS to Google Cloud to save costs and not have to pay an external service to give you sizing recommendations.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rob_c 5y ago

Was hoping there would be more of a numerical comparison to various strategies when scaling and a comparison to other strategies such as say self-hosting :( (aws has a useful place and a use, but obviously spawning a new vm for every query would just maximise cost over time)

SamuelAdams 5y ago

This seems like an ad for vantage more than a cost-savings tutorial. Can anyone talk about what specifically vantage is doing to identify cost-saving areas? Otherwise the title is misleading. Mods, can you update the title to be the actual title of the article?

StratusBen 5y ago
For what its worth, the original submission of the post as we saw it was our blog post title of "Vantage Launches AWS Cost Saving Recommendations" and was updated to this presumably by HN mods.

jmann99999 5y ago

I don't know anything about Vantage. It sounds like people have had good luck with them. However, what gets us our greatest savings on AWS are two things. First, we have the luxury of being able to take advantage of Reserved instances. We have decided how much we are wiling to commit on EC2's, RDS, etc. and it saves us 10-30% depending on what we do. Second, and this is perhaps the more interesting one. We started working with an "AWS Advanced Partner." Billing goes through them and that reduces our charges. In addition, they pitch projects of ours to AWS and if they are interesting enough to AWS, AWS reduces charges for periods of time on servers related to those developments. While we use AWS, I think the game is the same with Google or Microsoft. So, if you are looking to save some money, you may look into companies who are Advanced AWS Partners, Premier Google Partners, or Silver Microsoft Partners. It's likely they can help you out.

nexuist 5y ago
> In addition, they pitch projects of ours to AWS and if they are interesting enough to AWS, AWS reduces charges for periods of time on servers related to those developments. Is there IP transfer here? They give you a discount in exchange for knowing how you're making money?
- cratermoon 5y ago
  First taste is free...
- k__ 5y ago
  I'd say they give them a discount for developing something a customer will then (have to) run on AWS.
- nrmitchi 5y ago
  I have no evidence, but my suspicion is that programs like this are designed similiarly to large credit grants given to startups. If they see a project that seems "interesting" (ie, has a potentially to be successful and have a very high AWS spend in the future), they're willing to subsidize[0] some costs now in order for you to get used to and build around AWS, and likely build more closely to AWS. If it ends up being successful, AWS has a much larger customer. [0] I say subsidize in quotes because I seriously doubt AWS is taking a loss on any of this, they're just not making quite as much in profit.

KronisLV 5y ago

If you're somewhat poor like me (living in Eastern Europe, current net salary around 1500 euros a month; provides decent quality of life here but not in a globalized economy), then the first step of saving money would be not to bother with the expensive cloud vendors: AWS, Azure and GCP.* * this advice does not apply if you're a cog in an enterprise, then use whatever the company mandates Here's a few alternatives, from the most expensive to the least expensive: DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ A pretty popular VPS provider that i'd say is cheaper than the above to start us out. They also offer a whole bunch of different managed services, if you're into that sort of stuff. Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing Much like DigitalOcean, sans some of the managed services. On the upside, they also sell smaller instances, though those tend to be sold out in my experience. Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ Have a look at their Development or Starburst instances (the latter are smaller ones like Vultr), also they rival DigitalOcean in their managed offerings. Pretty good CPU performance as well, in my experience. Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud I'd say that they're cheaper than all of the above, but also have a reasonably modern control panel, as well as block storage services if you need more space. ID verification might be necessary if you're from an undesireable country, though, so YMMV. Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 I have used them for almost all of my servers in the last 4 years or so (hence affiliate link in case you check them out) - the control panel is somewhat more dated and the managed offerings are limited, but they're one of the cheapest legitimate hosts, since they're owned by a Lithuanian telco. They also offer noticeable discounts if you reserve instances for a year and i'd say they're a good choice for most purposes, provided that you have backups (i have a few backup servers in my home for that purpose). Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ https://contabo.com/en/vps/ Perhaps the best specs that you can get on the cheap, especially if you're after a decent amount of storage, which is larger than most of the other hosts provide you with (in lieu of block storage services). They do have a setup fee for the instances, the process seems at least partially manual on their part, the web UI is the most antiquated i've seen of the bunch, the performance of the instances is mediocre (they probably overprovision), but it all seems to work regardless. There are also other hosts out there, but the shadier they are, the more likely data loss and/or theft is. But hey, balance your needs with your capabilities to find what works the best for you! Perhaps i'll even write a blog post and include some automated benchmarks in the future on my blog. Edit: if you feel like spending some of your time looking for bargains (yaay for low alternative costs), then feel free to have a look at LowEndBox, where interesting deals are sometimes advertised: https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ Personally, however, i'd only pick companies that have been around for $SOME years.

brylie 5y ago

DigitalOcean App Platform is simple and affordable: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/

nijave 5y ago

Maybe this is more advanced, but just going off the screen shot it looks the same as Trusted Advisor https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-adv... If you have Enterprise Support, your TAMs can also help with cost and can arrange meetings and resources to address cost concerns, as well (including architectural reviews) If you're not large enough for that to apply or don't plan for huge growth, personally, I'd strongly reconsider AWS. Amazon's APIs and infrastructure automation can give small teams a lot of leverage to run massive amounts of infrastructure and quickly scale, but things with a small, fixed set of infrastructure might be worth a look on VMs, etc

Dunedan 5y ago
> If you're not large enough for that to apply or don't plan for huge growth, personally, I'd strongly reconsider AWS. Amazon's APIs and infrastructure automation can give small teams a lot of leverage to run massive amounts of infrastructure and quickly scale, but things with a small, fixed set of infrastructure might be worth a look on VMs, etc That doesn't make sense to me. Imagine you're paying ~$50,000/month for AWS and make good use of its features (of course if you're just running EC2 instances, using AWS adds little value). While that might sound costly, in my opinion it's still way too little to justify the additional $10,000/month Enterprise Support would cost. Using Enterprise Support would increase the bill by 20% in this case! In my opinion Enterprise Support only makes sense if your monthly AWS bill is close to or more than $150,000/month, as otherwise Enterprise Support is a quite expensive additional item on the bill, or if you require the additional escalation possibilities in case of problems that come with Enterprise Support.
- nijave 5y ago
  >don't plan for huge growth imo it might make sense at that point to consider other options. AWS definitely isn't cheap and $50k/mon is a lot on infrastructure for "free" support. I don't think AWS Support makes sense at that price (unless you're going to heavily leverage it) but I'm also not sure running $50k infra on AWS makes a lot of sense either

Aeolun 5y ago

Eh, my only experience with Vantage so far has been their apparent purchase and breaking of the ec2instances website.

StratusBen 5y ago
Hey there, can you please let me know what you're referring to? We largely haven't touched the site at all other than hosting it on our AWS account which as far as I know didn't impact anything negatively. Additionally, we've built an API for the data served through it: https://vantage.readme.io/reference https://vantage.readme.io/reference We have future plans to develop the site but I just want to ensure I'm aware of what you're referring to if you're seeing something we aren't aware of. Please feel free to email me directly at ben@vantage.sh if you'd like.

freediver 5y ago

Another way to slash cost is to use https://cloudoptimizer.io https://cloudoptimizer.io to locate cheapest cloud resources (disclaimer: my project)

marsdepinski 5y ago

With Amazon and any variable pricing model, there is no limit to how much you will pay. It's a conscious business model decision and a very smart one by Amazon. You want to be smart about costs? Limit your downside risk ie. Fix your costs.

spullara 5y ago

The best way to save AWS costs is to optimize your code. Seen it over and over again at many portfolio companies.

mrweasel 5y ago
Optimize, and redesign to use AWS features. Just dumping your existing code on EC2 is often a bad idea. We worked with a client and analyzed their workload and software. With a few minor changes we could reduce their always on EC2 instances with 66%. They where not interested. Then at least buy reserved instances? Nope, also not interested.
- spullara 5y ago
  For sure. And making sure you aren't using them inefficiently. At one point we were using 30% of our AWS spend doing S3 API calls. The next day it was 1% by optimizing that.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    That's pretty impressive. I'd love to read a write-up about what you changed and how you analysed the problem.
    - meekins 5y ago
      Sounds like optimizing data partition and blob sizes in Athena and/or Glue
  - spullara 5y ago
    We were using S3 as ternary storage for our time series database by moving values from the secondary SSD based storage to S3. Each of those values contained all the values for a full day. By using HTTP range queries and placing an index in the SSD store we were able to combine 30 days of values into a single S3 value to decrease the API PUT calls by 30x.

jasfi 5y ago

Write and use high performance software, you pay for what you use after all. I've been using Nim for some time now, and it gives me that with a syntax comparable to Python.

mfrye0 5y ago

I've been doing some AWS optimization recently. For my setup, which heavily uses a lot of short job based queue patterns, I've had a lot of success with the following: 1) Moving to spot instances where possible 2) Autoscaling rules 3) Reserved instances where possible 4) Moving everything to AWS Graviton based instances I cut the bill by ~70%.

dsincl12 5y ago

Did a quick search and didn't see UpCloud mentioned. Having used AWS, GCP, Azure and DigitalOcean, one of the strong points of UpCloud (except for their pricing and product offerings) have been their customer interaction. Hands down the best experience I've ever had both from support and sales. I reached out to support 2:15AM in their live chat and got my issues resolved as we spoke. Good luck getting that with one of the big companies. https://upcloud.com/ https://upcloud.com/

jesterson 5y ago
Never heard of it before and will give a shot. Thank you. Pricing seems to be similar to DigitalOcean, however there seems to be more resources allocated.
lozf 5y ago
> I reached out to support 2:15AM in their live chat and got my issues resolved as we spoke. Nice, but time zone matters - depending on where both you and they are based, that could have just been normal 9-5 making it seem better than the reality... Not detracting from the fact that it got resolved promptly of course.