back to article AWS budget tool update gives suits the control they crave

Amazon Web Services' (AWS') ongoing efforts to help users control costs have resulted in an upgrade to its Budgets tool? Cloudy blogger in chief Jeff Barr says the tool is aimed at “Finance Managers, Project Managers, and VP-level DevOps folks” and the upgrade offers “automated notifications that provide you with detailed …

  1. Nate Amsden

    i bet

    For most customers it will be too complicated to manage so they'll continue over paying because they can't figure it out.

    I remember at my org when we launched in amazon in 2011. I was hired before this even happened to move them out.

    The manager that hired me hired me at the previous company which used amazon as well him and another guy had pretty significant aws experience. Anyway the org did all sorts of cost modelling and benchmarks im advance of production launch (prior to that app was hosted at an ASP prior).

    Within a week all cost models were blown out and with performance in the toilet management asked to crank the knobs (and costs ) up.

    By the time we moved out about 4 months later we were on track to hit around 150k a month. Still sort of small fries compared to the 500k a month peak at previous company. Since that time probably grown 8 to 10x.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: i bet

      It really isn't in their best interest for people to control cost in their cloud - or others as well. All you will get is faux assistance on how to reduce your spend. If everyone using AWS suddenly figured out how to lower their bill by 50% it would be a problem for them, eh? So, faux pricing assistance. My guess is the unwashed AWS masses are grumbling about going to other cloud providers, hence the financial, transparent olive branch. Competition has a way of compelling things like this.

      1. Doogie Howser MD

        Re: i bet

        I understand why you might say that, but take a look at some of the ReInvent videos from last year and I'm not sure that's true. One customer did a big preso on how they saved costs by ensuring they used an appropriate instance type. In my experience, much like in the days of virtualisation, folks hopelessly overestimate how much compute they thought they needed.

        Anyway, the gist of this preso was that they'd rolled out a bunch of larger instances based on the assumption that the steady state compute would be pretty high. They experimented with T2 instances (bursty workloads) and found they were a lot more appropriate. This saved them something like 60%/70% per month on compute, which is generally the lion's share of the bill.

        Properly monitoring what you roll out and sizing it appropriately should not be overlooked once you're live. If you remember it's a living thing that still needs care and attention (regardless of what cloud providers say) then that's half the battle.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cloud crack

    Remember when people were arguing about opex vs capex and how opex would magically give you more budget?

    1. Chris 155

      Re: Cloud crack

      It's all just another machine that goes ping.

  3. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "VP-level DevOps folks”

    The horror... the horror...

  4. Sirius Lee

    In my view this is a poor article and may provide more illustration of the limitation of the El Reg mind. If a site is coming up on the planned spend, what is a company to do? Continue spending or cut back? It seems the author's view is that a company should just continue spending.

    Maybe that's the right course for some. But AWS is pointing out a way to contain costs is to stop using multiple sites behind a load balancer and instead drop back to one server without a load balancer.

    If you are already running multiple web sites behind a load balancer - as many are - then you are already running multiple web sites. AWS tools like cloud formation and containers make it straight forward to add and remove servers based on demand. Normally only the internet facing load balancer needs a static IP address.

    But the premise behind the sarcasm in the article is misplaced because it is not true to say that it is necessary for two 'versions' of a site to be maintained. I think this demonstrates the author doesn't really have a great understanding of AWS or perhaps, wrote the article with impaired faculties.

    AWS is pointing out that using a lambda function, possibly triggered by a billing event, a company could call a task that might:

    1) Remove the static elastic IP address from the load balancer;

    2) Shutdown the load balancer and all but one of the EC2 instances hosting the web site; and

    3) Associate static the IP address with the remaining web site EC2 instance.

    Job done. The web site is now using one machine and cutting back on costs. Is it difficult? No. Does it require the maintenance of a special version? No.

    It's not an elegant approach to cost management but it seems likely the comment seized upon by the author was an attempt to remind users of the options they have available to control costs automatically not a statement of best practice.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I think the intention of the article is more to show up the flaw in the automatic assumption that going cloudy will always be cheaper (an argument cloud providers have done their level best to maintain, by the way). It has been the killer argument used in boardroom discussion that somehow seems to override any other considerations like confidentiality, SLAs, security and control.

      There is a time-honoured principle that ought to compel you to keep all options open and plan a bit more long term: the first hit is always free..

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Continue spending or cut back?

      I think that this highlights the suitability of considering to use the cloud for ephemeral storage and computation, but not for core business functionality such as accounts, stock control and other similar purposes. Just imagine the accountants being told to reduce the number of transactions they post, or enquiries/reports they produce due to a budget ceiling being reached.

      CUSTOMER: Can you send me a statement as we want to pay you?

      ACCOUNTANT: Sorry we've used up our cloud transaction budget for this month.

  5. Adam 52 Silver badge

    "Asking IT to build and maintain two versions of the same website because full-scale operations may sometimes not be in the budget also looks an interesting use of resources."

    An eminently sensible one if you want to be able to withstand a spike in demand for whatever reason. Auto-scaling and serverless architecture will only take you so far, eventually you may need to fall back to a static site if load increases.

    Cost just adds another element into that decision.

  6. Wensleydale Cheese

    20,000 budgets per client?

    "The service now allows the creation of 20,000 budgets per client"

    That could be useful but just as with VM sprawl it will take a lot of managing.

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