I'm Sorry, Do You Have a Reservation?

Links:

• Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/
• Pete’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/petecheslock

Transcript

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Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.

Pete: We’re back again. We’re continuing the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Savings. What are we talking about this week, Jesse?

Jesse: This one’s actually one of my favorite topics. I feel like I say that every episode, but they’re all my favorite topics; just don’t tell any of them that. This week, we are talking about investing in your future. We’re talking about making investments in the AWS platform in terms of reservations.

Pete: Awesome, yeah. I mean, there’s usually a return on investment. But investments are a complicated part. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways that Amazon is happy to take your money, right?

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like this is one that people are aware of tangentially, but I don’t think a lot of people think about regularly. I really wish more folks would make a habit out of regularly looking at usage and looking at the potential for reservations. Because as you said, Pete, there are amazing opportunities to receive a return on that investment, and I don’t think enough companies are taking advantage of that.

Pete: Yeah, there’s a lot of nuances, and we’ll dive into all those things. But before we get started, just want to remind all of our listeners that this Unconventional Guide, you can actually head over to the Duckbill site and go and download this guide, we have it as a handy PDF, for review. Obviously, it’s going to cover some of the future episodes as well. So, you get a little bit of a sneak peek there.

Jesse: Spoilers.

Pete: But if you do better with a written format, it is available. I would read the link off but it’s comically long and figuring out short URLs, we just haven’t reached that level of technical ability over here. So, we’ll include the link to that PDF in our [show notes 00:02:01], and you can go check it out at duckbillgroup.com. But also to go, too, lastweekinaws.com/QA and ask us questions. Send us your questions, your thoughts, your comments, your feelings. As someone I used to know a long time ago, your bitches, moans, groans, and complaints, just add them all in there. And you can add your name; you don’t have to, you can just send it anonymously. But ask your questions. We’ll be taking some time in future episodes to go into those questions and dive in deeper on some of these particular topics that people might be a little confused by or maybe just want some more insight into.

Jesse: Yeah, we’ve gotten some great questions so far that we are planning on future episodes for, and please keep the questions coming. There’s some really, really great questions, really, really great commentary in there. And we absolutely want to make this an engaging conversation. We want this to be a two-way conversation.

Pete: Absolutely. So, diving into investments, I’d have to go online and do some research, but I’m pretty sure it was probably the EC2 instance reservations, were the first type of commitment that you can make to Amazon. And again, if I’m wrong, folks out there listening, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA and let me know of that. Or you could just tweet me as well at @petecheslock. That’s what most people do is, when I’m wrong, it just tweet at me. Right, Jesse?

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, well, I have a direct connection to you, but if I didn’t, I’ll just tweet at you.

Pete: Yeah, you’ll just tweet at me or Slack DM me or whatever; send me a Zoom message, or maybe hit me up on Chime.

Jesse: Oh, god, yes. If somebody is hitting you up on Chime, you know you’re in trouble.

Pete: That’s very true. [laugh]. Something has gone wrong if I get a message on Chime. But what’s interesting is that the instance reservations was a way of ensuring capacity, and you could basically commit to running an instance, an availability zone in a certain region, and that instance would be there for you. It was a capacity reservation, which is actually something different now, which we might touch on later, but it wasn’t really like a, “Give me a discount.” That came later. 

It was an instance reservation: reserve this instance. And this was important because for those folks who have been part of Amazon in the earlier days, there were times that you would ask for a certain instance type in a certain availability zone and Amazon would kindly tell you to go pound sand because they didn’t have one of those for you.

Jesse: Yeah, this is something that we’ve seen with a number of clients who are largely multiregional and leveraging basically every instance type you can think of under the sun, and really putting all of these compute resources to their limits. So, getting some kind of confirmation that they would have this capacity available is kind of important.

Pete: Exactly. I remember specifically—this was yeah, maybe 2010 timeframe, kind of the heyday, the wild times of Amazon—we had been running—a company of mine had been running a sizable NFS cluster on EC2. “Why would you do that Pete? That’s a terrible idea.” Of course it’s a terrible idea. 

We didn’t do it by design; we did it because we were a startup, and that was a proof of concept that got out of control, like most technology, right? But when we lost the NFS server itself, we had—I can’t even tell you how many—let’s say 50 EBS volumes that were all striped to this server because that’s a great idea. And we needed another server in that availability zone. We’re not going to snapshot, like, 50 terabytes of EBS. I don’t even know if that capability existed then, to move snapshots across availability zones. 

So, we needed another instance, and luckily we had a great relationship with our account team—because we were so early—that I do remember, specifically, we got through to the right people. And the line was essentially, “You need to make this API call in the next 15 minutes, or you’re going to lose the instance that we’re basically setting aside f...