When @QuinnyPig and I started @DuckbillGroup in 2019, I sat down with Corey and asked him to braindump everything he looks at when assessing a client's AWS spend in the first pass.

I then came up with a simple framework that's easy to memorize and still serves us today. 🧵 Step 1: Turn that shit off.

Whatever you're not using, get rid of it. Really not much more to say there.

Seriously, everyone thinks Google shuttering GCP is the hilariously-and-awful scenario.

I think it’s actually Workspaces/GSuite.

GCP fits with their obsession to be a legit cloud player, while Workspaces doesn’t.

Workspaces is used by nearly every company, unlike GCP. I’ve seen inside some of the largest companies out there and they’re running either Office 365 or Google Workspaces. Based on my sampling, it’s like 15/85.

That would be a catastrophic scenario.

That’s the one that keeps me up, not GCP.

We (@QuinnyPig and I) work on AWS bills of all shapes and sizes, from $5k/mo to $20m/mo.

Something unexpected is that the largest bills are *boring*. The smallest bills are super interesting.

The reason why is pretty obvious, in hindsight. Spending millions a month on cloud isn't something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of time!

A lot of time where architectural decisions are baked in and not easily changed.

I've been neck-deep in AWS billing data all day and all the technical debt AWS has here is somewhat amusing.

And, also, I feel for them so hard.

Some things that stand out 🧵 UsageTypes have regional prefixes (eg, USW2-EBS:VolumeUsage.gp2 for gp2 EBS volume in us-west-2).

Except us-east-1, which has no regional prefix, so the UsageType is VolumeUsage.gp2.

This is true of every UsageType for every service in us-east-1.

I once heard @moonpolysoft comment that monitoring tools are what SREs build when they don't have any better ideas. That was some years ago, now.

I think the current iteration of that is:

Cloud cost tools are what engineers build when they don't have a better idea. Seems like I'm finding new cloud cost tools every damn day, and there's basically clones of each other (which are, in turn, clones of Cost Explorer).

It's just getting silly.

I love @ScrivenerApp. This is the second book I've written with it.

And yet, I still have one glaring problem: how to track feedback easily?

Last time, it was such a pain I stopped using Scrivener because the workflow necessary created new problems. Last time, feedback came in via email comments and marked-up PDF/DOC. I'd then implement it, generate a new manuscript, and share that one.

Such a pain in the ass with all the different manuscript versions it resulted in.

A friend asked me recently what I think the big things are that make GCP, Azure, and AWS different from each other.

I think the biggest thing is how they view customers. GCP, organizationally, seems to have disdain for customers. Almost as if the whole org is thinking, "We would have the best cloud if it weren't for all these pesky customers bothering us"

I don't know how true that is personally, but it's my perception.

One of the things that's always bugged me about the way @DuckbillGroup does consulting is that we inevitably move further and further upmarket as we go.

Today we've made a move to help our smaller, more startup-y brethren. 🧵 The main issue is that AWS bills get shockingly large.

We have clients spending $5mm/mo (and more!) on AWS.

When you've got a choice between working on a $250k/mo bill and a $5m/mo bill, you go with the latter--you can charge more.

I've had a front-row seat to organizations building cloud finance teams.

Here's the top three mistakes I see most of them making. 🧵 #1 - Putting a finance person in charge of it

Managing cloud costs is an engineering problem, not a finance one. Finance has to assume that's what running is correct and that's a bad assumption.

One of the most misunderstand aspects of managing an AWS bill is that people often think it's a finance problem.

It's not.

It's an engineering problem.

A thread. 🧵 The challenge comes down to this:

Cost and architecture are the same problem.

To optimize cost, you're optimizing architecture. That's engineering, not finance.

Bold opinion about AWS costs I have:

Many folks believe dev environments are the primary source of wasted spend. I don't think that's true at all.

The primary source of wasted spend is poorly-architectured production environments. Seriously folks, "terraform picked the wrong prod instance type" is 1) *yawn* and 2) barely moves the needle

I'm talking *core architectural decisions*.

eg, Clickhouse is your primary database? Awesome.

That has *real and expensive implications*

In my time consulting, I've realized a potential client has three hurdles they have to get over before they even _think_ about hiring a consultant.

All three are out of your control but can save you tons of time during early conversations.🧵 #1 - They must acknowledge there is a problem.

If the org doesn't believe $thing is an issue, then there's nothing left to discuss. In other words, you can't help someone who doesn't want help.

I've been conducting a lot of candidate interviews over Slack and email lately and it's been great. A thread about my experience so far. I didn't intend to conduct interviews over email. It just sorta...happened. It started when a candidate sent me an email after a live interview with a bunch of questions. It was clear from the email that they liked written communication. So I responded via email.

Sunday Morning Marketing Lesson #1

Ford has two main brands: its economy brand, Ford, and its premium brand, Lincoln. The Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator are basically the same car but the Navigator starts at $25k more than the Expedition.

What's up with that? A thread!🧵 Answer: positioning

That's a marketing term that encompasses a number of things: who you market to, what you say, how you think, and more.

Positioning is a foundational concept you see _everywhere_. Even you, personally, do positioning.

Okay, let's talk about why this totally isn't a joke.

A thread about why accounting firms are atrocious and it'd be so. fucking. easy. to be better.

This is mainly aimed at small business owners.

https://twitter.com/mike_julian/status/1401330849677594627

Most accounting firms view their primary function as "count the beans" or "manage the books". While this is indeed table stakes (seriously, you can't fuck this up), most firms just sort of... stop there.

They're missing a whole bunch of things.

Consulting 101:

My top 10 lessons in getting paid to give advice. 🧵 Lesson 1: You can only help people who want to be helped.

No amount of "but they need my advice!" results in you getting paid for your advice. People must want the help.

I've been getting some questions about what our Cloud Economists actually do, so let's talk about that for a bit! 🧵 Our Cloud Economists are all engineers. Our team lead, @jesse_derose, came to us as a DevOps Engineer. @nerdypaws is a software engineer. @petecheslock is formerly a systems/devops person. Same for @QuinnyPig and I.

Why's this matter?

Let me tell you why I'm so excited about our new thing, Meanwhile in Security (meanwhileinsecurity.com). 🧵 First off, the author is just amazing. We managed to convince @JesseTrucks to write it for us. 💪

Many of you don't know Jesse. You're really missing out (psst, subscribe to the newsletter+podcast!).

Jesse's been an infosec+systems expert for, like, freaking ever.

I was holding this back, but you know what, let's kick this hornet's nest.

Many engineers are unprepared for the autonomy and freedom they demand.

Most problems in business will not fit in your well-scoped JIRA ticket. That doesn't mean you get to ignore them until they do. Like, lemme get this straight: you expect a six figure salary, full autonomy to solve problems as you see fit, and _also_ bite-sized, well-scoped bug reports/features.

riiiight

Some more background on why this mattered so much to us: an incident with a former employer really colored my view on this problem of conflicts-of-interest.

Story time!

https://twitter.com/mike_julian/status/1357184999544393728

I was brought into a client to solve $specificProblem as a Very Senior Resource and subject matter expert. I was, *ahem*, not inexpensive. The sort of person whom executives have to sign off on.

Most of my cost to the client went to my employer, as it should.