<story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tistel</author><text>I have worked at a startup that was paying &amp;gt; 20k &lt;i&gt;per month&lt;/i&gt; for AWS.  I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade.  There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of &amp;quot;spin up another box&amp;quot; for every silly little tool.  I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine.  I was like: &amp;quot;if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev&amp;quot;, because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine).  The reply was &amp;quot;thats not possible&amp;quot; so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle.  We are paying &amp;gt;3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste.  &lt;i&gt;sigh&lt;/i&gt;. old guy rant over.</text></item><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&amp;#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thruhiker</author><text>Did you weigh these costs against the value of the developers not stepping on eachother&amp;#x27;s toes using the same instance?Separate users with sudo privileges provides zero isolation.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m unsure what use case was, but if it was a testing or staging environment dedicated to each developer, having a separate right-sized instance for each is quite sane and reasonable.&lt;p&gt;EC2 instances such as the T2&amp;#x2F;T3 series are cheap enough that there&amp;#x27;s normally not a need to be so miserly in my experience.</text></comment>
<story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tistel</author><text>I have worked at a startup that was paying &amp;gt; 20k &lt;i&gt;per month&lt;/i&gt; for AWS.  I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade.  There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of &amp;quot;spin up another box&amp;quot; for every silly little tool.  I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine.  I was like: &amp;quot;if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev&amp;quot;, because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine).  The reply was &amp;quot;thats not possible&amp;quot; so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle.  We are paying &amp;gt;3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste.  &lt;i&gt;sigh&lt;/i&gt;. old guy rant over.</text></item><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&amp;#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigfubar</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked for a certain IoT startup that at one point paid $850k&amp;#x2F;month (eight hundred and fifty thousand USD per month) for AWS usage. After about a year of full time work by a team of SREs and programmers, the bill was made to go down by half.</text></comment>