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5 May, 51 tweets, 17 min read
It's @awscloud billing week. Ask me anything about your bill!
No, but they can be shared to other accounts within the AWS Organizations.

Astute folks will note that you can buy RIs / SPs in accounts without support, and apply them to accounts with support to save money.

docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbill…

Personally I prefer @digitalocean for the use case; they embrace their fixed-fee model willingly rather than begrudgingly.

Because of a herculean internal effort, honestly. You used to have to wait another week or so.

Because the AWS system isn't set up to make any distinction between "a student with a runaway resource that should be stopped" and "we're going viral, keep going this is GREAT!"

And that's an increasing problem.

Because Amazon knows where you live, and now offers free one-day shipping on the can of whoop-ass they'll open on you if you try to avoid the bill.

See it?! I was one of the people who *requested* it! For a bunch of FinServ companies it's an absolute godsend.

If you don't know why it's amazing, you almost certainly don't need it. It's generally not a major cost driver.

I don't suggest the path I walked. It gets spendy and all-consuming.

Ignore my polite request about your open S3 bucket. You'll find it harder to ignore the 40 petabytes I shove into it to get your attention.

Start by consolidating your three Route53 zones into one; clean up what's probably an RDS snapshot, and then we'll optimize the DynamoDB monstrosity that's left.

At the part where I realize my strategic blunder in not instead positioning myself as an IoT service reseller, if we're being honest.

At this point I think it's fair to say that I'm the undisputed expert in all things @awscloud billing. There are obviously AWS folks who grasp nuances of different services better than I do, but holistically across the entire estate? I'm very lonely.

Pull up the billing page, but it's probably a Route 53 zone, some paltry S3 or snapshot charges, and maybe a handful of CloudFront requests.

I'm not sure I've seen a company fully deploy cost categories; give yourselves a gold star.

I'd use tags as a component to set the cost categories personally.

Personally I'm petty like that. Although I'd be surprised if they're not just wiping the 15¢ charge each month; they pay more than that to process your credit card.

Because secrets are pro-rated up to their 40¢ a month cost, and it wasn't there for an entire month.

Yet.

I generally prefer Enterprise Support or "nothing" personally. I hope to one day downgrade to Enterprise Support from my current "complain on Twitter" package.
You may not be able to; understand that your small team of serverless developers doing greenfield projects are going to cost more than the data warehouse team; your use cases will be hilariously divergent. This gets deep into cultural aspects.

Because if they can add disks faster than you can fill them, it *is* infinite storage.

You will run out of money before AWS runs out of disks.

The answer is super hard to fit in a tweet; fortunately I don't have to.

duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-cost-…

"In preview" means @awscloud wants to get a service in front of a broader array of customers, validate that they built the right thing, and figure out how I'm going to misuse it as a database before they commit to it.

Favorite? "Turning off everything and only turning things back on that are specifically complained about."

Most effective? I start with the big numbers and work down; your $20 million bill doesn't care about 4 unused Elastic IPs.
Give up on realtime; the data's 8 hours delayed at best.

Cost Explorer until it falls down; then you're into playing Big Data games with Athena, Tableau, the CUR, and Glue.

You can swap out components of that stack at will.

Config used to charge per rule; now it's per rule evaluation, and the pricing is generous. Are you still seeing high charges? That's not something I typically see!

Managed NAT Gateway charges, EIPs, EBS volumes, snapshots, data transfer, and oh so very much more because there has to be a burning dumpster to collect the odds and ends somewhere on the bill...

This is one of the reasons I dislike Kubernetes.

Multiple accounts always. It’s the only perimeter that saves you from rate limits, for one.
Sure! It just requires a bit of work to get there. Generally folks close the account and start over.
Massively if it’s a private subnet. 4.5¢ per GB drops to free. And gateway endpoints incur no costs.
Click “Usage type.” It’s either a bunch of requests or something is shoving data into there because your security posture is about to be a learning experience.
Because there’s an S3 free tier that resets monthly.
It’s no Heroku, but it gets the job done. You can break out of it when the time comes / the costs grow untenable.
I’d look at @ChaosSearch first; after that it becomes harder. Their managed service is limited in a bunch of ways, but running it yourself is also painful.
That’s a deep question. It’s going to depend upon your application and constraints.
Surprisingly I’ve never explored the “getting barred from using AWS ever again” problem space, so I couldn’t tell you.
Data Transfer rates that don’t make a number of viable businesses give up on cloud during the napkin-math stage.
Free tier is per account. Have fun!
Yes, API Gateway.
Nope. But I can diagnose disturbing levels of architecture just from the bill!
Use the S3 Storage Lens to figure out wtf is going on in your buckets. It deprecated a bunch of our internal tooling, and we couldn’t be happier.
Lack of understanding-either of the AWS billing models and dimensions, or what your application is really doing.
We ask someone from @awssupport to take mercy on us and volunteer to dive in!
Spin up projects in their own AWS accounts for this reason. Past that, AWS-nuke is awesome.
Something about this workflow sets my spidey-sense tingling.

I want to dive deeper and it doesn’t fit in a tweet.
Behold this simple and straightforward data transfer price chart.

CodeBuild is AWS’s best serverless container offering, but if it’s this expensive you’re on the wrong thing. Time to build a dedicated CI/CD environment or use something more economic—but I’m curious as to the use case.
No contest: data transfer. It just kinda "happens" without intention, and it's very easy to lose the model and get surprised.

Yes. Amazon's peering and transit agreements aren't a factor in billing for transfer.

Because of how they work / what they are under the hood, combined with AWS’s reluctance to paper over that. Plus it’d be a form of fixed architectural lock-in I’d avoid if possible.
It can be done, but it's not easy or guaranteed.
You sure can!

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More from @QuinnyPig

Corey Quinn Profile picture
4 May
And now I shame @mike_julian, @nerdypaws, @jesse_derose and myself with...

A teardown analysis of the Duckbill Group's @awscloud bill for April. $2144 bill from AWS
Big spenders are RDS (up $200 a month), Fargate, EC2, Glue.

I previously talked about my Lambda Whoopsie that cost ~$80 more than it should have last month. That's a shame badge that's easier to pay than burn AWS credibility asking the Lambda team to fix it. Bill by services
(I resolved the problem by discovering it was a JS callback / event loop issue so I rewrote the thing in Python. This is a Thought Leader Best Practice.)
Read 4 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
3 May
"If you're going to swim with the sharks, make sure you give Amazon plenty of FinSpace" as the saying goes.

I'm sure Amazon FinSpace has a much less interesting tagline, but that's mine. Interesting service, highly niche-focused.

docs.aws.amazon.com/finspace/index…
The @awscloud marketing page isn't up yet, but the user guide speaks a lot about things that FinServ doesn't care nearly so much about (ETL and data lake issues) as they do other things (supporting insecure FTP from their partners for transaction data runs nightly).
This is a fascinating release, just because it focuses so clearly on a specific industry segment (a vast and lucrative one, to be sure; if you haven't worked in this space you'd be forgiven for underestimating it).

This is very clearly targeted to some customers, not the rest.
Read 4 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
3 May
Wait so the way around @awscloud’s Lambda@Edge’s shortcomings was to just route around it with a brand new offering?!
Lambda@Edge functions only executing in the regions themselves is also news to me. SO WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO DEPLOY THEM THEN?!
Apparently these will also take forever to deploy, but there's a "test" stage where you can get rapid feedback on what you've built. Huzzah?
Read 4 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
30 Apr
So I want to talk a bit tonight about college degrees.

Let me begin with the obvious: I don't have one. Today that's a fun story; my 20s were harder as a result.

It's clear that a degree makes you more employable than no degree.
But I've spoken with a few people lately who aren't happy with their current jobs and are toying with going back to school for a(nother) degree.

Slow down a second, Hasty Pudding; let me unpack that one for a minute.
A degree is expensive; I'm not going to do the math for you on that one. But it's also a lot of time that you're spending not making money, in most cases.

I've spoken to several people with two degrees who are convinced that a third will make them more employable.
Read 16 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
29 Apr
Today is Amazon's Earnings day, and true to form I will livetweet the call!

Will @awscloud be spun off?

Will the powerpoint slides feature a new template?

Will analysts remember that Amazon has a Cloud division?

Stay tuned for another episode of "As The Cloud Yearns"
(Periodic reminder that the single stock I own outside of an index fund is six shares of $AMZN that I've held for years. Not for any hope of financial gain, but because one glorious day I will shitpost via shareholder resolution.)
AWS earnings beat estimates at $13.5B for 2021 Q1 because nobody listens to me and turns their EC2 instances off when they're done with them.
Read 26 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
29 Apr
So I make fun of @IBM a lot, but an awful lot of that is based on my perception of them as an *institution*.
They're eternal, for all practical purposes; it feels like making fun of a mountain. What's the mountain care?

But they've done a lot of neat stuff.
I talk about being a terrible employee, but probably the best job I ever had was @TaosTech.

IBM acquired them recently, and the folks I know are happy as clams.
One of our great consulting clients was @InstanaHQ; those folks are *SHARP*.

IBM acquired them. I have heard no wailing or gnashing of teeth.
Read 5 tweets

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