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I'd really like to know where their costs are coming from, $400m/yr seems absolutely wild. I work for a large org who has 90-95% of stuff in cloud infra and we

I'd really like to know where their costs are coming from, $400m/yr seems absolutely wild. I work for a large org who has 90-95% of stuff in cloud infra and we don't spend even close to this.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
A well-known still-private YC unicorn has a similar spend to this, if not more. Thousands of beefy EC2 instances, petabytes of warm-to-hot S3 objects, chunky RDS instances and a large data warehouse add up pretty quick. It's important to note that these negotiated prices are way, way less than the sticker price. It's a win-win.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  or you could pay $1m to someone like Corey to revisit the architecture a little and shave $100-200m off that bill by not doing silly things? https://www.lastweekinaws.com/about/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/about/
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    Usually a large company has people as smart as Corey to avoid mistakes. AWS also tends to assign solution architects to contracts this large to help customers avoid waste. Sure, it loses them some spend, but the customer obsession earns them more trust.
  - chrisandchris 5y ago
    Corey recently blogged why Lyft is reasonable to pay a similar sum to AWS: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/4-reasons-lyft-is-smart-to-pay-aws-300m/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/4-reasons-lyft-is-smart-t... In short: it does not matter for a company that does not even have a profit and probably won‘t reach break-even soon. It‘s a waste of time to cut cloud-computing cost at that stage of the company.
JamesSwift 5y ago
Bandwidth is probably way up there on the list. Thats always been a surprisingly large chunk of the large AWS bills I've been a part of.