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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

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I sort of did that for a while. The differences between what management thinks they have, what is actually running, what data centers are charging back, what licenses are being invoiced, what finance is depreciating, and what is actually needed for operations can be astonishingly large.

I just took on a project that uses micro service style architecture (8 services total) and runs on AWS, has no customers, and costs more per month than I've seen very high revenue projects spend in over 6 months for hosting. I can't imagine how bad it would be with older projects with more cruft.

I think this space is hotter than ever. Hard to keep juicing profits for Wall Street when you are increasing AWS spend 5% month over month.

There are LOTS of companies spending a million a month or more on AWS.

Whoops, apparently I can't read.

That would be $52M per year. I would guess there are under 100 companies with that kind of AWS bill and probably closer to a couple dozen with that kind of spend.

$12M but sure.

Sounds like a great consulting niche. It's a simple to understand value proposition and I imagine there is somebody powerful at many successful companies that would love to see the huge server cost line item go way down on their P&L.

There are consulting roles like that, but you’ll make more in infosec and it’s an easier sell than arguing why you should capture your share of the value you’re delivering to make it worth your while.

I would never recommend it, but the thought has crossed my mind (definitely more than once) that the scream test could work wonders with cloud infrastructure [0].

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/anitag/2012/06/07/i-scream-...

edit: I suppose Chaos Monkey could be purposed for this task in hindsight.

That article took a horrifying left-turn when she started talking about using the scream-test for your test suite itself.

A test is not 'proven unnecessary' if you temporarily disable it, and show that a bug does not arise to fill it up!

AWS consultants most definitely exist already.

Why not use the hundreds of software tools that do this automatically?

Because there's a thing called "CYA".

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