AWS’s Valkey Play: When a Fork Becomes a Price Cut

ConvertKit posted their AWS bill, so I’ve given it a full analysis just like I do for our clients. Here’s six easy ways to improve their AWS bill.

Many cost optimization companies will talk about right-sizing instances or VMs as if it were trivial. Many companies have no idea about what they speak.

The internet lost its mind when it came out that Lyft is paying AWS $300 million dollars. I’ve got four reasons for you why they’re smart to do it.

AWS Enterprise Support is a fantastic waste of money–unless you use the support it buys you properly, at which point it becomes a jewel beyond price.

The idea of having multiple AWS accounts in your organization broken out not just by team but also by cost center isn’t the terrible idea that some people (including me until a year or two ago!) tend to assume it is. Permit me to explain why.

Today Randall Hunt posted an “emotional rant about AWS support” chronicling what he’s seen from them over the past ten years, and invited others to chime in with their experiences. Given that I’m arguably one of the four most sarcastic observers of AWS in the world, I figured I’d take him up on that invitation […]

I got an email last week from AWS telling me that since my Last Week in AWS account is now a year old, its qualification for the 12-month free tier is expiring. All good things must end, and I was expecting this. “If you want to estimate your monthly bill,” ends the email, “you can […]

Historically, one big item in AWS cost reports that wasn’t able to be assigned various costing tags has been EBS snapshots. The reasoning behind this was presumably tied to their differential nature– it’s presumably non-trivial to allocate thousands of very small amounts of data to a cost tag, nor was it a particularly high priority. […]

Once upon a time, Amazon offered four tiers of object storage: Standard S3 (this is S3 as commonly discussed) Infrequent Access S3 (costs less, but you pay to access it more frequently) Reduced Redundancy S3 (similar to standard S3, but offers 4 9’s of durability instead of Standard S3’s 11 9’s) Glacier (long term storage […]

Today Amazon announced Reserved Instance coverage reports in an effort to simultaneously help you control your costs while feeling bad about your infrastructure. At an implementation level this makes a lot of sense; define a percentage threshold for instance hours you want covered by reservations (a common number for initial baseline reservations is 70%), and […]

Yesterday evening Amazon announced a change to how reserved instances work. You can now modify your environment on the fly while still taking advantage of RIs. For example, you have an m4.xlarge reserved instance. You can now apply that reservation to four m4.medium instances instead– or vice versa. In the inverse (you have an m4.medium […]