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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Because this is largely a trivial usage calculation and long-term contract automation.

57% is the common savings number by moving to a 3 year commitment on AWS. Many people are hesitant to commit to 3 year contracts, it's hard to predict usage that far. Consider we may be going into a downturn and you are now legally required to pay for today's usage. Seems like OP is taking on some (all?) of that risk? I for one would not want to be the one holding those bags today, given the near-term economic outlook.

To get towards the 80% figures requires a deeper understanding of a company's usage, processes, and code. These need code changes

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Usage does take on all the risk. The good thing about cloud compute is that it's recession-proof -- compute volume isn't something companies can cut.

Sure they can: if you lose half your users because of economic downturn, you don’t need half your compute.

Or you could change your tech reduce your compute need by 10X+

There are plenty of blog posts around about that for X->Y

There is also the RI marketplace, they can probably sell overcapacity there even if their direct customers don't have any need for additional capacity.

And if a company folds, it doesn't need any compute at all.

You may want to reconsider this assumption. The cloud companies may be relatively "recession proof" because more companies are migrating to the cloud.

However, their customers are not. I've helped several companies reach 80%+ reductions in compute/storage needs, which then translates into similar cost savings. No reservations needed, you have to provide deeper value and changes to achieve this.

> Usage does take on all the risk.

Seems like a great way to get 3-year commitment prices without the risks. Are you worried about assuming all that risk? What about abuse of this relationship by your customers?

This assumes all compute was crucial for business operation. In practice however, a lot of compute volume just serves expendable reasons such as for example marketing people trying to data-mine interesting leads out of terabytes of sales data. Stuff you do, as a company, while you're flush with cash and thus ready to spend some on potential opportunities. These things however are the first projects to be cut when times are getting rough and budgets must be tailored down to survive.

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