Show HN: Cloudthread Savings Hub – Find AWS Savings or We'll Pay You | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cloudthread Savings Hub – Find AWS Savings or We'll Pay You

cloudthread.io

54 pointsdpackard19 comments

Hello HN! Daniele, Ilia, and Thomas here to share Cloudthread’s new Cost Savings Hub to help companies surface and eliminate cloud waste.

We’re putting our money where our mouth is: for the next two weeks, find over $500 in monthly AWS savings with Cloudthread’s Savings Hub or we’ll give you a $100 Amazon Gift Card. More context: https://www.cloudthread.io/aws-save-or-get-paid

Most cloud infrastructure managers know there’s waste in their cloud environment but it’s challenging and time consuming to 1) surface all the waste, 2) convert those opportunities into actualized savings, and 3) have confidence in cloud cost efficiency as you continue to grow.

We make it easy to uncover all your waste in AWS, easily filter/prioritize by cost impact/difficulty, group opportunities for action, create Jira tickets to enter engineering sprints, and analyze savings progress.

A video walkthrough of the Savings Hub by Ilia, Cloudthread CPO, is here: https://youtu.be/0j12fiXDgYc

The Savings Opportunities Explorer aggregates recommendations from native AWS tools (e.g. EC2 rightsizing from Compute Optimizer) and Cloudthread computed savings recommendations (e.g. RDS/ElastiCache rightsizing, S3 intelligent tiering savings, unattached EBS, NAT Gateway savings, & many more). For a full list of the savings opportunities we surface, see here: https://docs.cloudthread.io/guides/optimizing-cloud-costs/su...

Opportunities are assigned a Difficulty to make it easy to filter/prioritize by cost impact and implementation complexity. Each opportunity shows relevant usage data to evaluate the recommended action directly from Cloudthread (e.g. for an RDS rightsizing recommendation, see max CPU and Memory utilization in the last 30 days).

Opportunities can be grouped into Threads which are mini cost management projects - track progress, create a Jira ticket, and eventually close threads to track actualized savings.

Excited for any and all feedback and excited to help you reclaim cash from AWS asap. If there are other cloud cost-saving actions you’re manually evaluating that can be done programmatically, please let us know and we’ll add it as a savings opportunity!

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We've used AWS Trusted Advisor before for these types of cost optimization opportunities, which I didn't see mentioned above. Do you also pull in TA recommendations?

Yes, for companies using TA these are included in the Opportunities Explorer.

Most of the TA cost optimization recs we replicate and compute ourselves so that companies that don’t pay for TA (lots of $ !!!) can see those opportunities. And if you’re using TA you can toggle between seeing RI/SP recommendations from Cost Explorer or TA.

Got it, that makes sense. Thanks for the response!

$500 in monthly savings is huge. Love the video walkthrough. Congrats on the launch, Team Cloudthread!

We primarily use Cost Explorer to dig deep into cost usage.

What are some of the primary factors of Cloud Waste that you have noticed and can you share top 3 recommendations to reduce Cloud Waste?

Thanks!

Cost Explorer is nice. If you want more granular data (resource level, hourly) then you need to look at your Cost and Usage Report which you can do with Cloudthread or AWS CUDOS dashboards.

Biggest way to save quick with zero engineering effort is through committed use discounts (Savings Plans / Reserved Instances) if an org hasn't done this yet.

Top 3 source of savings for customers from Cloudthread computed opportunities has been RDS/ElastiCache/DynamoDB rightsizing, EBS volumes in standard storage that can be archived, and s3 intelligent tiering implementation.

Typically it's worth doing a round of usage optimization (e.g. rightsizing) so you're not buying committed use discounts on unnecessary/wasted instances :)

How do you define difficulty? I’ve seen companies with vastly different opinions on difficulty based on how they’re set up. Can I edit the difficulty based on my own company’s needs?

Definitions we use when rating savings opportunities are below.

Right now users can’t edit the difficulty but that’s helpful feedback if you think it’s something you’d use!

Would you want the ability to change difficulty to one of our fixed difficulty categories or the ability to add a custom difficulty unique to your org (e.g. custom difficulty based on internal approvals/processes at your company)?

Easy: zero downtime, zero performance risk

Medium: zero downtime, potential performance tradeoffs

Hard: downtime required, potential performance tradeoffs

This seems like a fair way to split it up and would apply to a broad range of scenarios. I actually lean towards the tool being more opinionated about classifications like these- I’ve seen many tools that bog themselves down because people focus on making granular adjustments to the tool itself rather than using it to execute. A special purpose tool like this should be able to nudge me towards best practices without giving me too many opportunities for distraction!

Thanks for the input. Definitely tough to balance being opinionated and guiding with best practices vs being flexible for unique company use cases and right now we're trying to "nudge" :)

We particularly wanted the "Easy" savings opportunities to be things a cloud cost owner (Head of Infrastructure or Cloud FinOps) could execute centrally without creating tickets for eng sprints. Quick wins.

As one of the co-founders of Cloudthread, and a veteran cloud cost management expert, I would be happy to answer any questions on the idea behind our Savings Hub.

Best of luck with the launch of Cloudthread's Cost Savings Hub! It sounds like a fantastic tool for optimizing cloud infrastructure and eliminating waste.

-Simar

Congratulations Daniele and Cloudthread! Good luck in your journey of making money whilst helping companies to make money

Seems like a great idea, cloud costs can be brutal and it gets so complex it’s hard to know what’s really needed.

Congrats team! Love that y’all are creating Jira Tickets directly from the cost saving hub, that’s super useful

Sometimes the difference between a savings opportunity and engineering action is a Jira ticket :)

Thanks Pranav!

Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Way to go Cloudthread!

Once aws credits run out, this is a lifesaver

Do you support GCP?

Yes, but right now for GCP we're only aggregating cost recommendations from Google Recommender.

For AWS on the other hand we're also computing dozens of our own savings opportunities.

In the coming month we'll be adding more GCP opportunities - would be very excited to hear what you'd want prioritized

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