Show HN: See your costs for each AWS resource | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: See your costs for each AWS resource

vantage.sh

32 pointsStratusBen10 comments

Hi all,

I'm Co-Founder and CEO of www.vantage.sh - we recently launched "Advanced Analytics" which gives you the ability to see the accrued cost of each individual AWS resource in your AWS account(s) day by day broken down by cost category (computer, storage, transit, etc)

This gives you the ability to see costs for "hard" resources to see costs for...so imagine seeing the cost of each Lambda Function, Cloudfront Distribution, SNS Topic or SQS Queue.

The way this works is that Vantage will automatically profile for all active resources in your account using List/Describe service API calls then join that up with Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data.

Happy to answer any questions and hopefully this helps people demystify their AWS bills a bit. We also have a healthy free tier for the first $2,500 of AWS costs per month if you want to give it a shot on a personal account.

Thanks for offering a free tier. Will check it out and have a look at things.

The original premise of clouds was good. Allow companies to run their software on someone else's machines. The cloud guys wanted to make more money so they started cloning commercial software and then charging companies to use their home-grown stuff. Then the cloud guys began to sub-divide and monetize slivers of service and components of hosting. The danger obviously is that you pay more than if you had your own on premise hardware. Even more serious is the fact you are locked in to their home-grown software and management tools. I predict a re-examination of the whole cloud paradigm at some point relatively soon.

> The original premise of clouds was good. Allow companies to run their software on someone else's machines.

That's not the original premise of clouds, that's the original premise of renting out servers, which is much older. The original premise of clouds is “enable dynamic provisioning of resources”.

I’m a happy customer. Vantage caught (after a week) a 50% month over month increase we had overlooked. So we were able to rein it in and mitigate damage.

Would this finally make was cost consultants redundant? (Prob not)

That's definitely not our ambition with launching this feature. That being said, we do consistently hear that cloud consultants tend to be inaccessible and/or prohibitively expensive especially for startups/SMBs.

As developers are becoming more financially savvy as it relates to cloud infrastructure our goal is to simply give them the suite of analytics tools to dive deeper themselves. This feature launch supports that aim.

I have never done cost consulting but if I were to, I’d use this tool to do the grunt work and then use my brain to advise clients on how to actually cut costs. Like, rearchitect this piece based on that etc.

So my guess is that this would weed out cost consultants that are just glorified report writers, in exchange for ones that can actually give you actionable customized advice, rather than the canned type.

Exactly. You nailed it.

It's similar to a Github repo in some respects. Developers will connect their AWS account, invite their teams and temporarily add folks like cloud consultants to their Vantage team to provision some reports or do some initial investigation. We're thinking through some more collaboration features in the future to support this more.

I'd love to use this today. Will try it out.

We are a small team and have a hard time monitoring costs. The AWS billing alerts (which I setup after realizing too late that our ES cluster was costing us more than the rest of our infra) are rudimentary but need a bit more intelligence about exactly where our stuff is underutilized.

AWS has tools for _all_ these things (and can even show you underutilized or oversized resources) but they are quite half baked. I think this is intentional because they don't want to make it brain dead simple for you to cut costs.

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