[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a service to help companies reduce ...
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Show HN: I built a service to help companies reduce AWS spend by
50%
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help
companies drive down AWS EC2 spend. Why? Because the way it's done
now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time
managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous
to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research
at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of
smaller startups. Here's how it works: We are typically brought in
by a DevOps manager to cut AWS EC2 costs. The app is entirely self-
service and the savings are generated automatically, typically we
do this live on a call. On average, we reduce AWS EC2 spend by 50%
for 5 minutes of work. To reduce by 50%+, we don't touch the
instances, require any code change, or change the performance of
your instances. We buy Reserved Instances on your behalf (a billing
layer change only) and bundle them with guaranteed buyback. So you
get the steep 57% savings of 3-year no-upfront RIs with none of the
commitment (you can sell them back to us anytime after 30 days).
We make money off of a 20% Savings Fee. Happy to chat directly
kaveh@usage.ai Have you experienced any issues with managing your
company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your
feedback and ideas!
Author : kavehkhorram
Score : 84 points
Date : 2022-02-02 20:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usage.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usage.ai)
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Honest question, who is still on bare ec2 anymore?
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| Many of our customers are on EKS or ECS backed by EC2!
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Huh? What is wrong with "bare" EC2 instances?
| stackedinserter wrote:
| We are, AMA.
| matwood wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by bare, but my ECS clusters are backed
| by a mix of ondemand and spot instances.
| tedmiston wrote:
| I have found ECS Fargate just running containers directly to
| be more convenient for most of my services and workloads. But
| I do _occasionally_ miss some of the features that don 't
| have analogies in ECS Fargate (yet).
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Are you asking that cuz serverless is the new marketing
| hotness? There's a big world of tech beyond your bubble and
| it's not running lambdas.
| phamilton wrote:
| RIs like this are great, but the biggest savings we've found is
| moving everything we can to Spot Instances. We're hoping Aurora
| on spot becomes a thing as that's really our only remaining
| RI/on-demand cost.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, spots is where it's at. The problem is to leverage spots,
| the application in question needs to be 'cloud native'. Many
| companies moving to the cloud are simply picking up legacy app
| servers and dropping them on an ec2 instances and declaring
| success. Those will simply not survive the properties of spots.
| mayank wrote:
| > Aurora on spot
|
| How would that work for a database? And have you considered or
| tried Aurora Serverless?
| Thristle wrote:
| I guess the same way as aurora serverless. In general, RDS
| uses a seperate storage layer from the actual instances so
| you can do vertical scale/upgrades with 0 downtime (either
| read replica goes down or replica becomes master)
| tedmiston wrote:
| Relevant: https://github.com/cloudutil/AutoSpotting
|
| I've seen some third party services that automate migration to
| / replacement with spot instances, but haven't used them yet
| personally.
|
| Going serverless, in many places, has been the most effective
| cost optimization for me.
| [deleted]
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Part of a recent project I worked on involved this very issue,
| and significant savings are definitely possible. As an idea this
| is great, there's a gap in the market for this and very few
| addressing the issue, least of all AWS.
|
| However, there's a couple of little things that may block its
| wider adoption.
|
| 1. It's a big ask for some companies to create any sort of IAM
| role for an external company or contractor. Even though they send
| and receive sensitive data from any number of 3rd party APIs,
| most will be uneasy about IAM access. It's just a hang up more
| than a concern, but still.
|
| 2. Engineering managers either don't understand or don't care
| about cloud spend. They get their budget at the start of the
| year, and they grow it based on the previous year. They usually
| don't have anywhere to put savings later on in the year, and
| don't want to reduce spend, and hence budget targets, for the
| following year.
|
| 3. I'd half expect your idea to be bought out by Amazon and
| shuttered. Kudos to you if that's what happens! But it's costing
| Jeff Bezos another yacht, so he may not like that.
| Thristle wrote:
| about 3 - they didn't buy any of the other companies that
| already does RI cost optimization. So he is probably safe
| xwdv wrote:
| If it's not getting bought out what's the point? There's
| faster ways to make money.
| boynamedsue wrote:
| There are dozens upon dozens of companies doing exactly this
| sort of service for AWS. And they all use the describe API
| calls requiring IAM permissions.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I started an MVP a little along these lines.
|
| The idea was a single page that showed all your AWS resources
| across all regions and all accounts.
|
| The good thing was it ran purely in a browser via the AWS
| JavaScript APIs, so you did not need to create users or roles or
| give access to any third party - you just put the AWS key into
| the browser and it ran locally.
|
| It's still there but effectively abandoned.
|
| https://www.singlepagecloud.com
| viraptor wrote:
| That feels like something that AWS would want to shut down if the
| business ever gets large enough. AWS has its own partners / AWS
| distribution program, which usage.ai doesn't seem to be a part
| of.
|
| Do you believe you'll be able to continue running this once
| someone high enough in AWS "notices" you?
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| We have a strong positive relationship with AWS and will be
| partners with them in the coming months!
| vmception wrote:
| like how Hollywood has a strong positive relationship with
| China until the censors suddenly deny all films access? Last
| year was pretty tough.. for example.
|
| well, hope you get a few months of nice payouts! individuals
| don't need ARR :) one or two nice paychecks is good enough
| for lifelong success, so you only have to be right once or
| solve a market need once!
| hatware wrote:
| Does it break TOS?
|
| Did Amazon shut down Snowflake despite losing a bunch of
| Redshift dough to them?
|
| I'm not sure why you feel AWS would shut down a company who is
| using their resources in a clever manner.
| limpigninja wrote:
| This doesn't make sense, there is no reason AWS would want this
| shut down. They are buying reserved instances, which AWS sell
| because it helps them to do so. They are charging the customer
| 20% savings to help them. They are buying the reserved
| instances back themselves if needed.
|
| From an AWS perspective this is simple market usage of AWS RIs
| and cost savings for the customer while easy/reliable usage
| predictability for AWS for cpu forecasting. It's a win. And as
| below looks like they have a healthy relationship with AWS.
| viraptor wrote:
| They're effectively a kind of bulk resellers. AWS may choose
| to be happy about it (happy customers keen to spend more on
| services) or not (less AWS income). It really depends on how
| the management sees it.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I don't think it would result in less AWS income -- AWS
| knows exactly how much on-demand, reserved, and spot
| instances cost them and they price them accordingly.
| foota wrote:
| I don't think this is true, if it shifts usage from spot
| instances to the reseller's spot instances backed by AWS
| reserved instances they'll be making less money.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| They shift to reserved instances, not spot instances.
|
| It'd be hard for a service provider to shift their
| customers instances to spot instances unless the customer
| could tolerate the spot instances being shut down on
| short notice, and if they can, that customer may as well
| just use the spot instances themselves.
|
| Worst case, this will increase usage of reserve instances
| and reduce on-demand usage, but AWS priced them
| accordingly, so they don't care
| stu2b50 wrote:
| That's only true in a nominal sense. Money right now is
| worth more than money in the future. Money spent on
| reserved instances is money Amazon has right now, whereas
| net AWS spend from spot instances is money in the future.
|
| How much money right now is worth more varies, but Amazon
| knows best here and prices accordingly.
| tthun wrote:
| Isn't this one of the features by cloudhealth
|
| [0] https://www.cloudhealthtech.com
| freediver wrote:
| A good place to start with cloud savings is just knowing what is
| out there. I built CloudOptimizer.io [1] for this purpose,
| aggregrating 10 cloud providers in one place.
|
| Running it as a free hobby project.
|
| [1] https://cloudoptimizer.io
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Interesting idea however in my experience EC2 is generally not
| where I need to start optimizing my AWS bills. RDS & other state
| [1] are by far the largest line items on my bills.
|
| [1] RDS / Aurora / Elasticache / OpenSearch
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| We have optimization features early in R&D for RDS,
| ElastiCache, and OpenSearch. If you'd like to try them out at
| some point, feel free to shoot me a note: kaveh@usage.ai
| secondrow wrote:
| ottertune.com optimizes RDS & Aurora, just fyi
| yonixw wrote:
| Do you support EKS or ECS on EC2?
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| Yes -- as long as it's backed by EC2, we support cost reduction
| for EKS and ECS.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| I cut costs of AWS by 99% by not using AWS at all
| [deleted]
| FujiApple wrote:
| The IAM policy shown on the website allows sts:AssumeRole without
| any restricting on resources or conditions which will be a deal
| breaker for many. Presumably you can restrict this to certain AWS
| principles?
| gigatexal wrote:
| Yeah this should be addressed.
|
| Also kudos I guess for landing kik as a customer.
| Mizza wrote:
| This is cool, anything in this space is useful, but everywhere
| I've been with significant AWS spend has already negotiated
| something directly. Caching and proper autoscaling policies
| usually take care of the rest, I've found the tricky thing to be
| RDS..
|
| On the other hand.. can I buy time on abandonded RIs directly
| from you for extra savings?
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| Yes - you can! Feel free to shoot me a note and we can chat
| more about this: kaveh@usage.ai
| wcdolphin wrote:
| Has anyone used Cast.ai or Spot by netapp as a comparison?
| Thristle wrote:
| Spot has an almost idential service to this called Eco
| https://spot.io/products/eco/
|
| It reads your cost and usage report + AWS APIs and offers RI
| options for you to purchase or ignore. What Eco is lacking is
| being a reseller like usage.ai and buying your unused RIs
| sokoloff wrote:
| Do users also get the reservation? If there is a capacity
| constraint in an AZ, are the instances reserved to the user's
| account or to usage.ai's account? (This is important to a
| minority of users, probably.)
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| The user's account!
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(page generated 2022-02-03 23:00 UTC)