Links:

• Unconventional Guide: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. We’re back again, my name is Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose. So, happy to be back in the studio after our whirlwind tour of the Unconventional Guide that I feel like we’ve been on for roughly as long as the pandemic’s been going on at this point; probably a little bit less. But lots of really great content there that we were happy to talk about, and I’m happy to be moving on to some other topics.

Pete: Yeah, absolutely. And the topics, we actually get to move on to some of our favorite topics, which are answering your questions. And it turns out, Jesse, there’s more than two people that listen to us. There’s a lot of you; there are dozens of you out there, and we love it.

Jesse: You like me. You really like me.

Pete: So, great. So, great to see. We’ve been getting tons of fantastic questions, a few of which we’re going to answer right now. You can also have your question answered by going over to the lastweekinaws.com/QA and enter in your question there. You can enter in your name, or you can leave it blank, or you could just put something funny there. Anything works. We’re happy to dive in deeper on any particular topic, again, whether it’s about this recent Unconventional Guide series or just something you’re curious about in your day-to-day in your cost management life.

Jesse: Today’s questions are really great because they ultimately get at the practical side of all of our recommendations. Because I feel like every single time I subscribe to one of those self-help books or blogs and I read all these really great short, sweet tidbits, I think to myself, “This is perfect. I’ll go apply this to everything in my life.” But then doing the actual work part is so much harder. Where do you even start with that first step once you’ve got the big picture grand idea? So, today we’ve got some really, really great questions, focusing on the best ways to get started on your cloud cost management journey. So, let’s start off with these questions.

First question is, “Could you cover some practical approaches to applying some of your Cost Management Guide? A lot of your suggestions sound simple on paper, but in practice, they become quite complicated.” So, true. Absolutely, absolutely a concern. “I’ve had some success pulling in a small group of subject matter experts together for short periods of time focusing on low risk, easy things to do. How have you approached actually doing this? What meetings do you set up? What do you take for notes? How do you document your savings? How do you find new opportunities?” That’s from Brian O. Brian O., That’s a really, really great question.

The other one that I want to add to this: “We’re a big AWS shop, and I’ve spent some time inside the AWS beast in the past, and I still struggle with multi-account multi-region data transfer in general, but specifically analyzing cost and usage. There are examples specifically like if data transfer out goes up $25,000 last month, how do you attribute that? How do you know where to apply that? How do you know what ultimately prompted that spend? Love how you work through these types of challenges. What is relatively easy at a single account level gets exponentially more complex with every account and region we function in.” So, true. And that’s from Todd. Thank you, Todd. In both cases, absolutely true.

There’s this really great idea of we can give you the really short and sweet things to think about, but taking those first steps for practically applying these ideas is tough, and it needs to scale over time. And not every practice does.

Pete: Yeah, these are great questions. I, kind of, am remembering that meme that was around for a while, which was, how to draw an owl. “First, draw two circles, and then, you know, you draw the rest of the owl.”

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: And honestly, oftentimes, some of the stuff even that we say, Jesse, feels that way, and it doesn’t intend to come across that way. It’s just, we could bore you all on a multi-hour long recording of some of these topics. I mean, we do this with our clients, and our clients pay for this pleasure [laugh] for us to put them to sleep with our soft tones of the cloud cost management world. But I think the reality is that it is complex and there are probably unlikely to be quick wins in a lot of these places. One thing that we found is honestly, monitoring, visibility, I think all the cool kids are calling it observability now—

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: —you know, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but CloudWatch is actually probably one of the best cloud cost reduction tools that exist out there. There are so many services within AWS that you’re probably using today, that by default, report data to CloudWatch. And those statistics are potentially a huge place to identify resources that are over-provisioned and underused, idle resources, things like that. I can’t tell you how many times that I will go into a client account, and one of the first places I go to is—after Cost Explorer—is probably CloudWatch. So, monitoring spend and monitoring what’s happening there is kind of a great way to get started on that cloud cost idea because you’re getting charged for everything that happens, so knowing what’s happening, and knowing how it’s changing over time is a great way to start understanding and reducing it.

Jesse: Yeah. And I think AWS is probably also using some of those CloudWatch metrics in their optimization recommendations that they make within their own optimization tooling. And it’s probably just not clearly defined or clearly outlined for AWS customers to be able to use the same metrics. So, I feel like if my Compute Optimizer could quickly load or link to a graph that showed me low CPU utilization across a number of instances, that’s a really handy way for me to start using more of CloudWatch’s metrics.

Pete: Yeah, I think Compute Optimizer is honestly, criminally underused out there. I don’t know why. Then honestly, one of the other complaints is like, “Well, you can’t get memory statistics unless you have a CloudWatch Agent.” Yes. So honestly, install the CloudWatch agent; have it report up, the, like, one or two memory metrics that Compute Optimizer needs to make a recommendation and the cost will more than pay for itself.