How to never be surprised by your AWS bill again | Hacker News Reader

How to never be surprised by your AWS bill again

blog.zenmetrics.io

21 pointsaray079 comments

This is an ad for ZenMetrics, which isn't available yet, so I'll throw my company's hat in the ring as well. Amongst other things, Cloudability [1] does cost monitoring and reporting, proactive budget alerting, advanced rightsizing and reserved instance recommendation, and anomaly detection and alerting. It works across AWS, Azure and GCP, and it's available right now from the AWS marketplace.

There are also other tools that do this sort of thing. Stax.io has their Spotlight tool, Cloud Conformity does some as well, and Microsoft still maintains Cloudyn as Azure Cost Management.

[1] https://www.cloudability.com

I wouldn't use your startup or any others in the space. I have a problem with AWS spend, but there is no transparent pricing on your website. Also I have to speak to a sales person, these two things are an instant no for any sass product

Cloudability's pricing is publicly available on the AWS Marketplace [1]. In general, we encourage people to work with our sales teams so we can work to fit our commercials to your requirements, but if you're happy to go with the standard terms and pricing, we're happy to supply product without talking you through it. [2]

Often though, teams will want help evaluating us against our competition, or will want us to help them convince their management that our tool is needed. Most frequently, your lawyer is going to want to work with our lawyer, and the sales team has to make that happen. The last thing we want to happen is for you to not buy our product because someone on the business side said no, or for a reason that could have been negotiated. That's not good for anyone.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B075PYPH14

[2] Disclaimer: I'm on the sales team. I love when this happens.

Try “cost explorer”. This is AWS’s official interface/api for navigating your spend. It lets you view the amortized cost of reserved instances over their term. The best part is that the numbers always add up. We used to use a third party service to analyze our AWS usage but we could never match up their numbers to anything - completely finger in the wind. Cost Explorer also gives recommendations for instance usage but we mostly ignore it because the stuff it suggests, while completely accurate, doesn’t match business need to be able to absorb spikes in usage.

The article mentions Cost Explorer.

I’ve used coat explorer but the fundamental problem here is they it’s a conflict of interest. Who in their right mind would trust Amazon to tell you how to save money on your AWS bill?

Just choose a provider with hard capping capability (if you really have to use variable billing as it's the case with many - but not all - "cloud" providers).

I once made a shim that would revoke a core permission of our system and halt some 80% of AWS usage if the spend went above a threshold.

Simple : leave AWS

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