This Blog
AWS costs are complex! Grokking them is tough – but not impossible. This blog is meant to equip you with the knowledge needed to master your cloud spend. Ever notice how Amazon has all kinds of training on how to build things in their cloud, but no training or certifications on how to manage the spend of it all? Armed with this blog’s content, you’ll be able to make sense of the gibberish AWS provides, and turn it into the actionable insights your organization needs to make the right decisions.
In trading stories of success I’ve had in overcoming common cost challenges with peers, “Would you ever consider open sourcing that?” invariably comes up. While this has been done well by others to solve for specific technical challenges, lasting success in this space isn’t going to come by way of technological silver bullet. It comes from the successful combination of the disparate disciplines (Finance, Cloud Technology, and Data Analytics) needed to optimize results and save big $$$. Think of this blog as the open-sourcing of a proven set of concepts and approaches based on years of focused effort and experience.
In offering this content, the hopes of return are twofold. First, that sharing these ideas and stories generates insightful feedback, questions, and suggestions to further broaden the author’s perspective and that of the blog’s readers. Second, to assess the potential of independently bringing to market a platform to assist others in achieving the same level of success I’ve been key to, at a much lower level of investment.
The Author
My career started in IT as a Mathematics education had fewer appealing prospects in 1998 than it does in today’s AI/ML-powered world. For the first 15 years the profession found me move from entry-level Help Desk to Director over a 20-site global org. Throughout this span the theme was always “Stick and Move” – the companies I worked for weren’t very big, and there were always 100 other problems to address.
From there I joined a much larger enterprise as it entered an aggressive journey from data center to AWS cloud. In late 2015 I was approached with the question “Hey we just got back from Re:Invent and heard about Reserved Instances – could they maybe save us some money?” and thus began what has been a 4+ year effort to optimize the enterprise’s use of AWS. This singular focus has been a marked departure from my many-hats past. At 2000+ hours/year x 4 years at the epicenter of optimizing one of Amazon’s largest and most complex AWS customers, must have me near 10,000 hour expert creds in the space.
Thanks for reading!