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Thank you for giving so many valuable suggestions. * My few hired some professionals and they told me that it's really difficult to actually find those, who ac

Thank you for giving so many valuable suggestions. * My few hired some professionals and they told me that it's really difficult to actually find those, who actually care to reduce your AWS costs. There are few third party tools in the market that gives budget alerts, daily cost of service breakdown etc. when integrated with AWS account? Have you tried any of those and how is your experience?

oriettaxx 4y ago
Yes, I know there exists those services and I have no doubt they can be effective, but we hit the following issues (it is our experience): 1. somehow it is easier to give access to a single professional (a human) instead of an external tool 2. the easiest way to check bills is to have full access to an AWS account, and it is not (due to bureaucracy) an easy task to allow an external tool to have full access (in the EU you have many GDPR implications, which is good of course). 3. at the very easiest level, you may share your screen with your expenses dashboard to a professional via video call without having him allowed to access directly your account This is our experience, but I am sure many others here can give feed-backs (and I am looking forward to read that, too)
stefanoco 4y ago
Totally agree with oriettaxx: nothing beats the supervision of an experienced professional. Automated tools are much like AWS... when automation fails, cost start rising again! Our experience is exactly the same as per your suggestions: we eventually switched to a set of properly configured (by a highly skilled and not so expensive pro) bare metal servers at a well known EU data center, and a few additional VPCs for commodity services that we might want to change more frequently. Was a new life both for money and peace of mind. Each time a receive a bunch of emails from AWS for the billing of a very small service still hosted there my heart starts beating fast. Because they like writing looong messages and duplicates, with plenty of details about your service and bill, and many thanks and everything so difficult to understand. I'm not blaming AWS of course: it's a legit business model, I don't particularly like. Your mileage may vary... but not so much actually unless you're in a highly variable type of business, with real need for constant change of configuration or resources.

oriettaxx 4y ago

Yes, I know there exists those services and I have no doubt they can be effective, but we hit the following issues (it is our experience): 1. somehow it is easier to give access to a single professional (a human) instead of an external tool 2. the easiest way to check bills is to have full access to an AWS account, and it is not (due to bureaucracy) an easy task to allow an external tool to have full access (in the EU you have many GDPR implications, which is good of course). 3. at the very easiest level, you may share your screen with your expenses dashboard to a professional via video call without having him allowed to access directly your account This is our experience, but I am sure many others here can give feed-backs (and I am looking forward to read that, too)

stefanoco 4y ago

Totally agree with oriettaxx: nothing beats the supervision of an experienced professional. Automated tools are much like AWS... when automation fails, cost start rising again! Our experience is exactly the same as per your suggestions: we eventually switched to a set of properly configured (by a highly skilled and not so expensive pro) bare metal servers at a well known EU data center, and a few additional VPCs for commodity services that we might want to change more frequently. Was a new life both for money and peace of mind. Each time a receive a bunch of emails from AWS for the billing of a very small service still hosted there my heart starts beating fast. Because they like writing looong messages and duplicates, with plenty of details about your service and bill, and many thanks and everything so difficult to understand. I'm not blaming AWS of course: it's a legit business model, I don't particularly like. Your mileage may vary... but not so much actually unless you're in a highly variable type of business, with real need for constant change of configuration or resources.