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Duckbill Makes Sure Everyone Gets What They Want Out of AWS

Duckbill sits at the intersection of three vital teams: engineering, finance, and procurement. Working as a translator and connector between teams, we make sure each team’s needs and desires are reflected equally.

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Engineering

Cost is a core aspect of engineering alongside security, operability, and resiliency. Duckbill helps engineering teams make cost-aware architectural choices without compromising other important facets of the product.

Finance

Finance teams shouldn’t be left on the outside looking in. Without AWS clarity, context, or predictable cost, it’s impossible for finance to do their job. Duckbill shines a light on the levers that affect your AWS bill to help finance teams budget more accurately and forecast with confidence.

Procurement

Procurement teams should feel confident in their AWS contract. But, it’s hard to negotiate on equal footing when AWS is holding most of the cards. You need an advantage when you’re negotiating what’s likely your biggest line item. Duckbill’s information, experience, and expertise help level the playing field so you can get the best contract terms possible.

Right away, we were able to stop the flood of dollars going out the door related to that Athena service. We started getting that and other items extracted right away and we were able to take advantage of those savings. Within the first one or two things that Duckbill found we more than paid for the cost of the engagement out the door and that was in a couple of weeks at most.

Jason LeBaron, VP of Solutions Architecture, Epsilon

“When Duckbill Group’s report said we’d save millions of dollars annually everyone could see this would be a big win.”

John Sheeley, Director of Cloud Engineering, Fanatics

Duckbill was a fantastic partner for us to work with. During our engagement, we were able to quickly identify a number of areas where we could reduce costs, without significant effort. We were truly surprised how quickly Corey was able to assess our architecture and configuration simply by walking through our AWS bills.

Brandon Grant (He/Him), Vice President, Cloud Operations, Vena Solutions

As a result of the cost-optimization work we did with Duckbill, we reduced our AWS bill by 25%—immediately. While we could have done this on our own, it would have taken much longer and we would have wasted a lot of cash along the way.

Fabian Lange, Founder and VP of Engineering , Instana

Now that we know exactly what each business unit spends in AWS, we can plan with far greater accuracy and pre-purchase resources at a reduced price. That allows us to trim the bill by 20-30%.

Tim Johnson, Director of IT, Hornblower Cruises & Events

Working with Duckbill was a game changer. We went from a negotiation where our cloud provider knew all the levers available and we had little to go by, to one where we had access to real time market data and cloud negotiation strategy expertise. Even though our negotiation had several complex elements, Duckbill was able to reach a very favorable outcome in only a few weeks, and supplied comparative data of our deal terms that was valuable for gaining stakeholder approval. Overall we highly recommend Duckbill and would be eager to work with them again when delving into cloud provider negotiations.

Anonymous, Engineering Leadership, A computationally-driven biotech startup

Duckbill Group gave us recommendations on specific changes that we can make to control our AWS costs, identifying 20-27% in savings.

Dylan Fried, Cofounder, CTO, & Chief Risk Officer, Lendable

The Duckbill Group came highly recommended, yet exceeded all our expectations. Mike and Corey know more about how AWS billing works than anyone else in the world, including all of AWS. In just a few weeks they helped us reclaim 10% of our entire operating budget. Best contracting money I have ever spent.

Charity Majors, CTO & Co-Founder, Honeycomb

As part of the cost modeling, Duckbill came up with a meaningful unit economic KPI for us to use: cost per thousand document views. It’s helped bridge the gap between how Finance perceives what we’re doing and how Engineering and Product perceives it. Finance can tie that metric to their annualized budget, while I can come from the other direction to identify how infrastructure changes we plan to make will impact that number. It just gives us a meeting place in the middle as we talk about costs.

R. Tyler Croy, Director of Platform Engineering, Scribd

Build a Better Strategy: FinOps Practice Assessment

Go Big with a Deep Dive: Get a Custom Cost Optimization Plan

Get a Better Deal: Negotiate your AWS Contract.

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