Hmm. This looks to me like a lot of the savings were realized by moving away from managed services into a scenario where there’s more operator overhead. The AWS bill gets lower, but what about the cost of the engineering work?
I find it highly entertaining a two-year old company who was founded on the basis of helping slash cloud spending found so much waste in their own AWS spend. This is <i>not</i> an example of dogfooding, but an example of sheer incompetency and massive technical debt.<p>I'd really like to start seeing a series of blog posts from companies who are running extremely lean and efficient tech environments by utilizing cloud in an intelligent manner and avoiding the expensive and unnecessary bullshit that's so prevalent today. The ones that can brag "How we run a $4M/yr SaaS on $40k/yr of AWS spend!" are far more interesting than "How we stopped incinerating millions of VC money by simply turning off shit we didn't need"
Back when AWS started, there would be articles about the work to master scalability and performance for the modern web but as things matured, we somehow ended up in a much larger heap of literature around AWS cost optimization.
I am curious about the actual cost in $! Managing your own kafka or observability infra is expensive, you need a team to do this.<p>A 67% reduction doesn't say the whole truth. They have more services to manage now, which means they need more people and more time to do this.<p>Saving 10k from your AWS bill by hiring 2 more engineers is not cost effective.
It seems reasonable to make some of these cost comparisons more visible.<p>ie If working on a new product or feature to understand upfront "this managed service is x% more then more bare bones" etc.<p>essentially turning an alchemy into a science