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If something seems unbelievable, it probably is. How can anyone not question how a 90% reduction was possible without proof? That said it looks like the compa

by mc32 4y ago

If something seems unbelievable, it probably is. How can anyone not question how a 90% reduction was possible without proof? That said it looks like the company did save money for a few months so the 50 grand was worth it although hard to maintain indefinitely and of course against ToSes and morally questionable.

wstuartcl 4y ago
"probably" but not always. I have worked on a few projects that saved 70-90% of costs for AWS -- but these all were starting from a position of auto scaling out a ton of ec2 (on demand full cost instances) to batch process huge amounts of data. In both scenarios by optimizing the batching to align tasks to pack as much as possible into (just short of hour long) hour long windows and converting to a (wide list of ec2 types to avoid contention lockout) spot instances there was easy fodder for the improvement. But yeah -- no one should see their bill change by that much without understanding exactly what was done to trigger it. Even in the best cases, there are always tradeoffs that must be known and accepted.
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Agreed with both you and parent commenter - the story comes across as almost apocryphal; a warning both that if it's too good to seem true, it probably is, and that one must always understand the work done and the tradeoffs involved (IE: don't fall asleep at the wheel)
prottog 4y ago
To be fair, a lot of cloud deployments are not optimized for cost, and it's easy to rack up big bills without really needing to.
- imron 4y ago
  To be fair, as an IT director, when you see this sort of reduction you should dig deeper and understand where the cost savings are coming from.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
[dead]
deltree7 4y ago
Reducing 90% cloud bill is not out of the ordinary.
CrimsonRain 4y ago
Reducing cloud costs, especially if the dev team does not have anyone experienced enough to focus on this, is often possible on massive scales. More so if you have free reign to optimize/rewrite stuff as you see fit. While not 90%, I've reduced cost by 83% in one case while increasing the ability to serve during peak times also.
franciscop 4y ago
90% savings is very easy if the system was built by a beginner. I helped a friend once who was starting and reduced his query by 99% of time, and thus quite a chunk of money, by a couple of simple changes (IIRC avoiding a JOIN he was making that he didn't actually need and adding an index).
orwin 4y ago
I mean, you can go from poorly-sized EC2 instance with autoscalinggroups constantly interrogating remote databases to full serverless with databases hosted on AWS, and 90% is an easy target.

by mc32 4y ago

wstuartcl 4y ago

"probably" but not always. I have worked on a few projects that saved 70-90% of costs for AWS -- but these all were starting from a position of auto scaling out a ton of ec2 (on demand full cost instances) to batch process huge amounts of data. In both scenarios by optimizing the batching to align tasks to pack as much as possible into (just short of hour long) hour long windows and converting to a (wide list of ec2 types to avoid contention lockout) spot instances there was easy fodder for the improvement. But yeah -- no one should see their bill change by that much without understanding exactly what was done to trigger it. Even in the best cases, there are always tradeoffs that must be known and accepted.

poulsbohemian 4y ago
Agreed with both you and parent commenter - the story comes across as almost apocryphal; a warning both that if it's too good to seem true, it probably is, and that one must always understand the work done and the tradeoffs involved (IE: don't fall asleep at the wheel)

prottog 4y ago

To be fair, a lot of cloud deployments are not optimized for cost, and it's easy to rack up big bills without really needing to.

imron 4y ago
To be fair, as an IT director, when you see this sort of reduction you should dig deeper and understand where the cost savings are coming from.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

[dead]

deltree7 4y ago

Reducing 90% cloud bill is not out of the ordinary.

CrimsonRain 4y ago

Reducing cloud costs, especially if the dev team does not have anyone experienced enough to focus on this, is often possible on massive scales. More so if you have free reign to optimize/rewrite stuff as you see fit. While not 90%, I've reduced cost by 83% in one case while increasing the ability to serve during peak times also.

franciscop 4y ago

90% savings is very easy if the system was built by a beginner. I helped a friend once who was starting and reduced his query by 99% of time, and thus quite a chunk of money, by a couple of simple changes (IIRC avoiding a JOIN he was making that he didn't actually need and adding an index).

orwin 4y ago

I mean, you can go from poorly-sized EC2 instance with autoscalinggroups constantly interrogating remote databases to full serverless with databases hosted on AWS, and 90% is an easy target.