Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (<a href="https://www.usage.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usage.ai/</a>)<p>We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations.
My background is in software engineering.<p>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.<p>Here's how it works: We are typically hired by the head of engineering. Usage makes its initial analysis of your organization's AWS usage, then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each recommendation for correctness. The human in the loop may reach out to if they are unsure about a particular recommendation.<p>We make money off of a monthly subscription to manage all of your organization's AWS spend management. Our fee is based on your organization's size and ranges from $2.5k-$10k/month. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai<p>Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!
Related reading: <i>Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?</i> (2017) [0]<p>The top comment is great. Two easy wins:<p>* Putting an S3 endpoint in your VPC gives any traffic to S3 its own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic. (It's curious that this isn't the default.)<p>* Auto-shutdown your test servers overnight and on the weekends<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587627" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587627</a>
For an (offline) alternative, check out → <a href="https://github.com/similarweb/finala" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/similarweb/finala</a> <i>(written in Go)</i><p>I started using Finala a couple of months ago out of experimentation, it works well, but you need to tweak the configuration a lot to help the tool understand your infrastructure, spending habits and normal usage. My colleagues are very happy with the results, we started saving ±1.8k per month, which is pocket change for our scale but is still money that we can spend on other things.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model.<p>Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised.<p>> optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms<p>> ...then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each recommendation for correctness<p>So how much of the heavy lifting is actually done by the algorithms?
[DISCLAIMER] software engineer @ AWS, not working on billing.<p>Interesting project! This product can unlock a lot of customer savings, and wishing you all the best.<p>I have a couple of questions:<p>- Are you focusing on EC2 compute costs or are you focusing on other AWS offerings as well? Curious to see how the savings compare to EC2 compute optimizer [1].<p>- How is your churn rate? What is the value of your product once a customer optimized their AWS bill?<p>- Do you have a screencast of your product?<p>[1] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/</a>
How do you compare to CloudHealth?<p>I do cost optimisations for living and though there are a lot of tools, most of them are niche and doesn't scale well. For generic purpose I tend to use CloudHealth, but still we write a lot of scripts to do some custom managment.
This is very much needed. I started to create something similar a few years back in case it's helpful. <a href="https://github.com/crizCraig/benjamin/blob/master/benjamin.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/crizCraig/benjamin/blob/master/benjamin.p...</a> Mostly it dealt with recommending reservations.
I like this. What a great idea for a consultancy. There must be so many organisations that are paying way more than they need by not tweaking each aws service they are using. Anything from using the wrong S3 storage type to using ECS when they could switch to Fargate.
as far as i can tell from the website this is mostly about converting workflows to RIs. what about right sizing or underutilized instances? do you need read permissions from cloudwatch to look at CPU/memory utilization or just the cost and usage report?<p>I work at a company that started from cost optimization but now offers a platform to manage the customers cloud operations and i only have 1 suggestion - be very upfront about the permissions/data needed for Usage to do it's job. you don't want to start a demo with a big/enterprise client only to find out your permission needs are way beyond what is allowed in that company for outside services
Think this is a growing problem.<p>Related:<p><a href="https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-problem/" rel="nofollow">https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-problem/</a>
Looks like the calculator needs a little tweaking!<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/Lp8B62n.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Lp8B62n.png</a>