Hi HN community, [Direct Link: www.usage.ai]<p>I’m Kaveh, founder and CEO of Usage, and am excited to show you Usage, an app that helps you slash your AWS EC2 bill by 50% in ~5min by trading reservations. As of today, Usage is in General Availability and any AWS user can use it. It works by creating a limited-access IAM role (ReadOnly + Ability to Manage Reservations) into your AWS account(s).<p>The AWS console interface has made it hard for companies to optimize their AWS spend. After years of working for different companies that use AWS, I still find it difficult to understand how much money I’m spending on AWS. I don’t know who owns what instances, how our commitments are saving us money (RIs, SPs, EDPs), and what instances can be sized down (or switched to spot).<p>At Usage, we are building a web-based app that keeps you in charge of your AWS while minimizing your bill. No code change, no moving your AWS account or instances around, and no downtime. We’ve built:<p>1) Real-Time RI/SP Recommendations: See which instances are uncovered by your SPs and/or RIs and get them covered with a single button tap. Instant savings.<p>2) RI Sell Recommendations: RIs that are no longer utilized are highlighted and sold instantly. No more worrying about unutilized RIs and no more needing to forecast your compute needs.<p>3) Consolidated View: View your EC2 instances and RI/SPs across all your AWS accounts in a single space. No more switching between AWS accounts.<p>4) Teams and Audit Log: Add as many users as you’d like to your Usage dashboard, and see who approved which recommendations.<p>We built Usage in ReactJS, Python, Java– and along the way we built our own internal accounting system to keep track of customer savings. We have plans to eventually release an open-source version of Usage.<p>Our business model is 20% of the savings we find you. We only make money when we save you money. We bill monthly and have longer-term enterprise plans available.<p>We take privacy extremely seriously. Your data is always protected both at-rest and in-transit. Additionally, Usage never collects or stores sensitive information. Usage only collects meta-data such as CPU utilization, launch time, instance configuration, region, etc. You can read our full privacy policy here: www.usage.ai/policy/<p>We are confident we can deliver a better AWS cost savings experience that is meaningfully better than other tools. If you use AWS, please give it a shot at www.usage.ai and let us know.<p>Let me know what you think! Ask me anything!
1. for EC2: use spot + RI and you should be fine -- probably. we did this back in ~2016/17 and our aws billing went down significantly [1]<p>2. bandwidth: until your bandwidth hits certain threshold of the total billing, maybe look into az-aware architecture to save cross-az bandwidth cost.<p>3. leverage the pay-as-you-go service as much as you can.<p>4. learn the pricing model and architect well.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410448" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410448</a>
You'd think companies spend more time trying to optimize their spend but I've seen 6 figure changes from tools like this. Filed under "obvious in retrospect".
The title of your page should annoy the hell out of AWS !<p>"$10,264,760 saved on EC2" : I wouldn't be too happy if I were Jeff Bezos :D
Hi Folks -- one important thing I should highlight about Usage is that it's more than just a RI recommender. All Usage RIs are backed by guaranteed buy-back so if you stop using an RI, Usage buys it back. This ends the need for customers to try and forecast their compute needs 3 years into the future.
Cool, I'll give it a try. I dont think there is much gain to be had as we are mostly on spot & reserved instances already, but I'd gladly be suprised ;)