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I have to ask 64% of what? I just ask because even a large AWS instance is relatively cheap. And saying, "We saved 64% in margin X" sounds great on paper. I'm

I have to ask 64% of what? I just ask because even a large AWS instance is relatively cheap. And saying, "We saved 64% in margin X" sounds great on paper. I'm forced to look at the big picture. How long did developing the solution to turn on/off the instance cost? Sure maybe a day, 8 hours, $800 dollars of labor at a base estimate, maybe less. How much time was spent in generating this report? Was this report generated before and this cost missed (how many times was it missed)? Whats the ROI on this solution? These are the question a manager should ask. And I understand if you can't divulge them across the internet. :.:.: I ask because AWS is cheap, and sure saving $50-100 a month sounds good. Put better toilet paper in the restroom, or buy bagels Friday morning. But if you are investing >$800 in developer time to engineer a 8-10 month ROI solution, wouldn't just buying a box to set in the corner and calling it, "The building/staging" box result in exactly the same savings? Without surrendering up time?

thecarlhall 12y ago
64% is the savings when comparing the cost of running the instances before and after scheduling. This directly correlates to the hours we dictated the machine to run (instances "on" about 36% of the time). This is also a very rudimentary example without dynamic scaling. So getting down to comparative costs, I wrote the script in about 90 mins while watching a TV program. Coming up with the numbers to compare before and after was 10 minutes at most. While neither of these incurred no loss of regular schedule time during the day (done at home on my time), you could account my hours at home by my some hourly rate. Even at very generous consulting rates, the ROI for these 100 minutes was easily realized in the first week that the script was in place. We were able to save $183 per week with this solution and that only touched 6 of our instances. We still have 1-2 orders of magnitude of instances to apply this to. This was identified as a quick and easy change and had the ROI been something months ahead, we would've addressed the issue in myriad other ways. These machines were already provably not being used during specific hours of the day, so uptime wasn't so much surrendered as the instances are set to be running when needed stopped when unused.

thecarlhall 12y ago

64% is the savings when comparing the cost of running the instances before and after scheduling. This directly correlates to the hours we dictated the machine to run (instances "on" about 36% of the time). This is also a very rudimentary example without dynamic scaling. So getting down to comparative costs, I wrote the script in about 90 mins while watching a TV program. Coming up with the numbers to compare before and after was 10 minutes at most. While neither of these incurred no loss of regular schedule time during the day (done at home on my time), you could account my hours at home by my some hourly rate. Even at very generous consulting rates, the ROI for these 100 minutes was easily realized in the first week that the script was in place. We were able to save $183 per week with this solution and that only touched 6 of our instances. We still have 1-2 orders of magnitude of instances to apply this to. This was identified as a quick and easy change and had the ROI been something months ahead, we would've addressed the issue in myriad other ways. These machines were already provably not being used during specific hours of the day, so uptime wasn't so much surrendered as the instances are set to be running when needed stopped when unused.