The Secret Ingredient Duckbill Looks for in Employees
What makes a great Duckbill employee? Someone who cares about helping others. We hire community builders who share our mission to protect clients and strengthen communities.
AWS Cost Allocation Guide: Tagging Best Practices
Build your AWS cost allocation strategy by aggregating costs through multiple tools and assigning them to teams. Learn showback models and unit economics to drive profitability.
Protecting Our Clients: Incentive Alignment
How Duckbill ensures we always serve clients’ best interests: staying independent, charging fixed fees, avoiding VC funding, and never implementing our own recommendations.
A Duck Tale
The story of DuckTools: why Duckbill launched an AWS cost management SaaS, what we learned from customers, and why we decided to shut it down after just one year in beta.
This month, we shuttered it.
Let’s talk about why.
AWS Begins Sunsetting RIs; Replaces Them With Something Much, Much Better
AWS introduces Savings Plans to replace Reserved Instances, offering up to 72% discounts with dramatically less complexity. Commit to hourly spend instead of specific instances.
POST No AWS Bills: Cloud Cost Optimization Without APIs
Learn advanced AWS billing concepts and how to optimize cloud costs without disrupting engineers. This talk addresses the misalignment between finance and engineering goals.
AWS Cross-AZ Data Transfer Costs More Than AWS Says
AWS says cross-AZ data transfer costs 1¢ per GB, but testing shows it’s actually 2¢—charged in each direction. The documentation is misleading at best about true costs.
You Need a Multi-Cloud Dashboard Because I Want To Sell You One
Why would you need AWS, Azure, and GCP on the same dashboard? Multi-cloud monitoring vendors sell solutions to problems you don’t have—and encourage poor cloud strategy.
What the hell is a vCPU-based on-demand service limit?
AWS’s confusing email explained: EC2 service limits are shifting from 261 instance-specific limits per region to five simple vCPU-based limits starting at 1,152 vCPUs.
Understanding Data Transfer in AWS
How much does it cost to move a terabyte of data in AWS? Who the hell knows. We tried though, and created a diagram to illustrate it.
How ConvertKit Could Lower Its $64K Monthly AWS Bill
A detailed analysis of ConvertKit’s $64K AWS bill reveals six optimization opportunities, including Spot instances, Elasticsearch alternatives, and NAT Gateway savings.
Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense
Cost optimization tools promise easy savings by right-sizing instances, but legacy workloads, hypervisor differences, and Reserved Instance commitments make it complex.