toeknee123

Yoooo. Appreciate the shout-out! I am one of the co-founders and CEO of https://www.cloudforecast.io/

We're a (mostly)bootstrap company, so it's always awesome to hear the "word of mouth" mention of my company. It means we're doing something right :).

Feel free to let me know if I can help in any way or answer any questions anyone might have!

Implementing a simple and effective tagging strategy for visibility and monitoring is one of the most important aspect of cloud cost control. From our experience, this is where most of our own users start.

Knowing the "why's" and "where" will help everyone within the org (eng and finance) make better decisions on what and where to focus on (https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/aws-tagging-best-practices...). Also, it'll make AWS Cost Explorer or any other cost managements tools WAY more effective.

Cost optimization can feel like drinking from a firehouse since there are so many different strategies, and approaches to it (autoscaling, spot, reserved instances/savings plans, eliminating idle & wasted resources, etc.). Also, you have to apply your OWN organizational context to it as well (business and tech side). There is a fine balance companies and eng dept need to take with cloud cost control since it can be a huge time commitment to pull your end dept into.

(disclaimer // founder of https://www.cloudforecast.io)

Appreciate the shout out and your assessment is pretty spot on w/ #1 (I am one of the co-founders of CloudForecast).

We're actually huge fans of Infracost and what they've done so far. They've built an amazing tool for eng teams, who should always be the lead when it comes to managing cloud cost. We actually have a few customers using them along side us as well.

Congrats on launch, Ali, Hassan and Alistair!

Congrats, Kevin and Pierre on the success. You've all been such an inspiration and model for us in the TinySeed community.

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know.

We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices.

(I'm a co-founder of CloudForecast)

CloudForecast(www.cloudforecast.io) is super excited to be part of this years TinySeed batch. Couldn't have asked for a better fit in terms of mentors, program and fellow companies.

It's great (and funny) to see how far our journey has come since we first launched on HackerNews almost 4 years ago [1]. This "launch" was a spring board for us to who we are today.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551796

100% agree. We're big fans of CloudCustodian and use it ourselves. However, it can be tough for some org to get approval with using open source tools.

100% agree. We've seen some crazy typos and other things while helping our customers clean up their tagging. We're developing Part 2 guide right now, which will cover Terraform and CloudFormation.

Those are really practical and interesting use cases for tags that we should definitely cover more of. Let me note this and we'll be sure to cover more in-depth uses as we develop more parts to this guide! Appreciate the feedback.

I hear ya on that! We've found that a lot of orgs just want to go straight into "how do we save money?" However, without having that visibility through tags and organizing your cost with tags....where do you even start.

Tony here, one of the co-founders of CloudForecast (www.cloudforecast.io)!

We just released a new feature to our daily cost reports that helps you keep track of your AWS Reserved Instances. The new feature helps ensure your Reserved Instances purchases are not going to waste by actively monitoring utilization and expiration across a few major AWS products: EC2, ElastiCache, RedShift and RDS.

Would love to hear your feedback and ways we can make this better!

Happy Friday! Tony here, one of the co-founders of CloudForecast (www.cloudforecast.io). We help companies monitor and optimize their cloud spend with a simple daily report that saves you time and money.

We know you and your team are busy building software. In less than 15 seconds, you'll know if there is a significant cost increase with your AWS cost with our easy to understand reports. We surface and summarize the exact problems areas so you are not caught by surprise at the end of the month with your bill.

Would love to get your feedback with our Slack integration!

Thanks for the assist!

Awesome! Glad this was helpful. There are still so many questions and unknowns though. Best of luck!

Tony here! One of the co-founders of CloudForecast. We provide a daily report that breaks down your AWS spend, allowing you to understand where your money is going. Our reports are easy to read and helps your team ensure AWS costs do not spiral out of control.

We launched last summer on ShowHN, got a few customers and great feedback from the community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551796

We just recently launched a new feature that brings our AWS cost reports into your Slack. We’ve been beta testing this for 2 weeks with our customers and we’re seeing different organizations (tech and non-tech) collaborate and discuss our reports. It gives a way for your whole organization to have more awareness around AWS cost.Pretty neat to see our product being used in a different way then we thought it would!

Hacker News Special: We’ll double the length of your free trial for the next week if you let us know you’re from HackerNews in our sign up form.

Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback. Looking forward to hearing from you all!

Shameless plug here. Working on an side hustle to help you monitor and measure your AWS spend: http://www.cloudforecast.io

You'll get a daily report that breaks down your cost for you via inbox with weather symbols indicating the health of your cost. Think of this like the weather you check every morning before you start your day. Our forecasting in our report is pretty accurate too!

Hit me up if anyone is interested with helping us and provide product feedback. We're offering a 60 day free trial for our first users so we can evolve from a reporting tool to a tool that help you save on AWS cost.

Would love to hook you all up: hello@cloudforecast.io

This post has been super helpful to figure out what we should start thinking about and what to build next!

Just a few tips: http://blog.perfectaudience.com/2013/04/26/want-to-ace-your-...

Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning how to develop the past 3-4 months.

Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible skill

Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.

Craigslist! I got a huge 10x4 ft one for $80 for our office. Probably would have costed over 300 new. The struggle was bringing it back.

Buying a new one is extremely expensive!

Here is a good one: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/for/3073429940.html

http://culturedcode.com/things/ and http://www.streak.com for work.

Google Calendar for everything.

Number 7 is a favorite of mine.

Sometimes you just need a nice long walk to clear your mind and reset your focus on the task at hand.