The New Frontier of Cloud Economics: Why AWS Costs Are a Weighty Issue
Oct 25, 2023
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The podcast discusses the challenges of understanding and predicting costs for AWS services. It introduces a new pricing metric - Amazon Aurora IO Optimized - and emphasizes the benefits of standardizing costs for easier infrastructure planning.
Amazon Aurora IO Optimized offers better cost predictability and a 60% reduction in expenses.
The invention of the Terabyte Pound Month metric allows customers to standardize costs based on weight and plan their infrastructure accordingly.
Deep dives
Complexity of AWS Pricing
The podcast discusses the complexity of AWS pricing and how it has evolved over the years. Instead of simple unit measurements like instance hours and gigabyte months, customers now have to grapple with metrics such as IO operations and LCUs tied to load balancer choices. These metrics often lack intuitive understanding of application resource consumption, making it difficult to predict costs. To address this struggle, Amazon launched Amazon Aurora IO Optimized, a pricing variation that eliminates fees per million IO requests. Open Raven, one of the customers, benefited from better cost predictability and a 60% reduction in expenses.
Introducing the Terabyte Pound Month Metric
In anticipation of upcoming complexity in pricing, the podcast speaker highlights the invention of a new absurd pricing metric called the Terabyte Pound Month. By considering the weight and storage capacity of physical devices like snow cones, snowballs, snowmobiles, and outposts, customers can calculate costs using the Terabyte Pound Month metric. The podcast provides representative cost examples per gigabyte Pound Month for each physical device. However, it's emphasized that these numbers are not exact and customers should consult their AWS account team for precise configurations. This new metric allows customers to standardize costs based on weight and plan their infrastructure accordingly.
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Understanding the Complex Pricing Dimensions of AWS Services and Introducing a New Absurd Pricing Metric