[HN Gopher] AWS Cost Saving Recommendations
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AWS Cost Saving Recommendations
Author : jeffbarg
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-07-13 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vantage.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vantage.sh)
| StratusBen wrote:
| :wave:
|
| I'm a Co-Founder at 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.
| Thristle wrote:
| 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?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| boba7 wrote:
| By not using AWS I have saved thousands. This one simple trick.
| hughrr wrote:
| 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.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Hilariously true. Yes, AWS has some services that are cheap
| and not really replaceable, like S3, but once you come near
| high performance EC2 and RDS and add multi-region in, you'll
| really have a bad time. Believe me, Ive been there and in the
| end had to migrate most of the applications to another
| provider or host on prem.
| christophilus wrote:
| Eh. S3 is easily replaced by Wasabi. And less easily by
| minio.
| hughrr wrote:
| Damn that's cheap on wasabi. No egress fees! Thanks for
| pointing this one out.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Do note that wasabi is aimed for long-term retention of
| cold data. There's no egress, but there is a fair usage
| policy (2x data stored IIRC).
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It's fucking ironic how AWS selling point was how it was more
| cost-effective than managing your own infra.
|
| Yet another classic SV-style rugpull.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Preach! AWS is overrated.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Me too. The data transfer costs would be the killer for me
| (video conferencing).
| rvnx wrote:
| Switch from AWS to Google Cloud to save costs and not have to pay
| an external service to give you sizing recommendations.
| [deleted]
| jmann99999 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| rob_c wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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/ 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 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/ 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 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 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/ 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/
|
| Personally, however, i'd only pick companies that have been
| around for $SOME years.
| jpr5 wrote:
| 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!
| Thristle wrote:
| 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
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| 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.
| brylie wrote:
| DigitalOcean App Platform is simple and affordable:
|
| https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/
| gnfargbl wrote:
| 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. EUR100/mo for
| 16 Ryzen 9 cores, 128GB of RAM and 3.84TB of NVMe. Unlimited
| traffic.
| christophilus wrote:
| Netcup is also excellent. It's the best CPU bang for the buck
| that I've found, and where I run around 10 transcoding servers.
|
| https://www.netcup.eu/
| gnfargbl wrote:
| While we're on the good-value dedicated server providers,
| Contabo are also worth a look:
| https://contabo.com/en/dedicated-servers/amd-epyc-32-cores
| mwint wrote:
| Do you have a link to a page with VPS sizes/prices? I'm only
| seeing marketing stuff with no real numbers. I'm on mobile,
| might have something to do with it.
| kjaftaedi wrote:
| Their fraud system errantly tagged me and they deleted all my
| data.
|
| I got an email saying there was an issue with my account,
| called them within 10 minutes of the email and was informed
| they had already deleted all my data.
|
| They reinstated my account which was just a blank shell,
| nothing remained but my username and password.
|
| You get what you pay for.
|
| If you go with them make sure you back up your data to a
| separate provider.
| heipei wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| system2 wrote:
| No U.S. alternative.
| hughrr wrote:
| That's less than my accidental personal AWS bill a couple of
| months ago!
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(page generated 2021-07-13 23:00 UTC)