AWS Morning Brief

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 28, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Tim: I’m Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways that we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about AWS re:Invent. Now, I know that most of you know what re:Invent is, but I just would love to set the playing field level for everybody really quick. Amy, Tim, what is AWS re:Invent.Tim: AWS re:Invent is AWS’s week-long corporate conference. It’s not really a user conference; it’s certainly not, like, a community conference, but it’s a week-long sales pitch in the desert. It’s like the worst version of a corporate Burning Man you could ever imagine because they even have a concert.Jesse: It is in Las Vegas. Now, I personally have mixed feelings about going to Las Vegas in general, but this adds so much to the conference in general because it’s not just in a single conference venue that’s centrally located near the hotels. Is it is across the strip—Amy: It’s the entire strip.Jesse: It’s the entire strip. So—Amy: They block every hotel and they buy every piece of ad space.Jesse: Yes. There is no escaping AWS re:Invent for the entire week that you’re there. And sometimes that’s a good thing because you do want to be involved in what’s going on, but other times, it is a lot.Tim: So, I’m trying to figure out which LP that ‘buy the entire Las Vegas trip’ covers because it’s certainly not be frugal.Amy: No. [laugh].Jesse: No, not at all. But we do have new information. We decided to do this episode specifically because new information was just released about re:Invent for this year. Amy, what is that information? What do we know?Amy: They’ve decided, in having to go virtual last year, due to some kind of horrible global crisis, to return in person to the world’s most densely packed tourist spot, Las Vegas, and host this huge event from November 29th to December 3rd—that’s right after Thanksgiving—and just, what do they say? Return to normal. Return to normal.Tim: That way everybody can get exposed to COVID before they go home for the holidays.Jesse: [laugh].well, you at least get one holiday in, if you celebrate or recognize Thanksgiving, and then you get to bring everything back after that.Amy: Yeah, people bring enough things back from Vegas. I’m not sure we’d have to find more reasons. [laugh].Tim: [laugh].Jesse: I know that there’s that great marketing tactic of, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but—Tim: That’s not what they say at the clinic.Jesse: Nope. Mm-mm. Now, I will say, I know that almost every conference event was completely virtual last year due to the pandemic, and this year, a lot of conferences are still trying to straddle that line between what’s acceptable, can we do maybe smaller events in person, some kind of a hybrid online/in-person thing. I have mixed feelings on this. I appreciate that I can still attend AWS re:Invent from home this year digitally, I can still watch a lot of the main keynote events and a lot of the other information that is being shared, but I don’t know, it’s always hard because if you do a hybrid event, you’re automatically going to miss out on any of that in-person socializing and networking.Tim: Well. So, I think it’s interesting. AWS re:Invent suffers from the same issue that pretty much all other conferences suffer from is that there’s not really value-add in the talks, at least for attending.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: If you’re going to be able to see those talks afterwards if the announcements are going to be publicized afterwards which, that is true in both cases, then what’s the point of spending the money, and the time, and the possible exposure to go watch them in person? So, then the other thing is, “Well, we want to go for some of the training seminars,” or some of these other things. Well, those are also offered online, often. Or, like, copies of them online. These are the same kinds of tutorials like that that you can have your TAM or SA run if you’re an AWS customer currently; that’s what they’re doing there.The other thing is, too, those in-person sessions get filled up so quickly that there’s no guarantee [unintelligible 00:05:08] anyways. And that’s one of the complaints they’ve had about re:Invent in the past is that you can’t get into any of the sessions. And so, you couple all that along with most of the reason going being—if it’s not the talks and is not the sessions, it’s the hallway track. And then you got to kind of wonder, is the hallway track going to be valuable this year because if it’s hybrid, what percent of the people that you would normally talk to you are going to be there and what percentage aren’t? And so there’s a lot of calculus that’s got to go into it this year.Jesse: I’ve always struggled with any vendor-sponsored event, all the talks feel either like a sales pitch, or they feel like a use case that just doesn’t fit for me. And that may just be where I’m at in my professional journey; there’s definitely reasons to go if you want to see some of these talks or see some of this information live, or be the first person to talk about it. Or even the people who are going to be the news sources for everybody else who want to be the first person to talk about, “Oh, we attended, and we saw these things and were live-tweeting the entire conference.” If that’s your shtick, I fully support that, but I always struggle going to any kind of vendor conference because I just feel like the value that I get from the talks, from training if I go to training, just doesn’t feel like enough for me, personally.Amy: So, I’ve done some of the AWS-led training when Summit was in Chicago, a couple years ago, and I’ll be honest, you lose a lot in these large AWS-led trainings because these classes, it’s not going to be like the ones that you would sign up for even being hosted either by your company or by your local user group chapter where you will have at max 100 people. You have well over that. You have an entire conference room full of people, and they’re asking questions that are across the level of expertise for that topic. I went for one of the certification training seminars and straight-up 15 minutes was spent talking about what a region is. And given that’s page one of any training material, that was a waste of $300....

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 21, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Tim: And I’m Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today is a very special episode for two reasons. First, we’re going to be talking about all the things that you want to talk about. That’s right, it’s time for another Q&A session. Get hyped.Amy: And second as is Duckbill’s customary hazing ritual, we’re putting a new Duckbill Group Cloud Economist Tim Banks through the wringer to answer some of your pressing questions about cloud costs and AWS. And he has pretty much the best hobbies.Tim: [laugh].Jesse: Absolutely.Tim: You know, I choke people for fun.Jesse: [laugh]. I don’t even know where to begin with that. I—you know—Amy: It’s the best LinkedIn bio, that’s [laugh] where you begin with that.Tim: Yeah, I will change it right after this, I promise. But no, I think it’s funny, we were talking about Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby, but my other hobby is I like to cook a lot, and I’m an avid, avid chili purist. And we were in a meeting earlier and Amy mentioned something about a bowl of sweet chili. And, dear listeners, let me tell you, I was aghast.Amy: It’s more of a sweet stewed meat than it is, like, some kind of, like, meat candy. It is not a meat candy. Filipinos make very sweet stews because we cannot handle chili, and honestly, we shouldn’t be able to handle anything that’s caramelized or has sugar in it, but we try to anyway. [laugh].Tim: But this sounds interesting, but I don’t know that I would categorize it as chili, especially if it has beans in it.Jesse: It has beans. We put beans in everything.Tim: Oh, then it can’t be chili.Jesse: Are you a purist that your chili cannot have beans in it?Tim: Well, no. Chili doesn’t have beans in it.Amy: Filipino food has beans in it. Our desserts have beans in it. [laugh].Jesse: We are going to pivot, we’re going to hard pivot this episode to just talk about the basis of what a chili recipe consists of. Sorry, listeners, no cost discussions today.Tim: Well, I mean, it’s a short list: a chili contains meat and it contains heat.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: That’s it. No tomatoes, no beans, no corn, or spaghetti, or whatever people put in it.Amy: Okay, obviously the solution is that we do some kind of cook-off where Tim and Pete cook for everybody, and we pull in Pete as a special quote-unquote, outside consultant, and I just eat a lot of food, and I’m cool with that. [laugh].Jesse: I agree to this.Tim: Pete is afraid of me, so I’m pretty sure he’s going to pick my chili.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I could see him doing that. But also, I just like eating food.Tim: No, no, it’s great. We should definitely do a chili cook-off. But yeah, I am willing to entertain any questions about, you know, chili, and I’m willing to defend my stance with facts and the truth. So…Amy: If you have some meat—or [sheet 00:03:19]—related questions, please get into our DMs on Twitter.Jesse: [laugh]. All right. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted their listener questions. We’ve picked a few that we would like to talk about here today. I will kick us off with the first question.This first question says, “Long-time listener first-time caller. As a solo developer, I’m really interested in using some of AWS’s services. Recently, I came across AWS’s Copilot, and it looks like a potentially great solution for deployment of a basic architecture for a SaaS-type product that I’m developing. I’m concerned that messing around with Copilot might lead to an accidental large bill that I can’t afford as a solo dev. So, I was wondering, do you have a particular [bizing 00:04:04] availability approach when dealing with a new AWS service, ideally, specific steps or places to start with tracking billing? And then specifically for Copilot, how could I set it up so it can trip off billing alarms if my setup goes over a certain threshold? Is there a way to keep track of cost from the beginning?”Tim: AWS has some basic billing alerts in there. They are always going to be kind of reactive.Jesse: Yes.Amy: They can detect some trends, but as a solo developer, what you’re going to get is notification that the previous day’s spending was pretty high. And then you’ll be able to trend it out over that way. As far as asking if there’s a proactive way to predict what the cost of your particular architecture is going to be, the easy answer is going to be no. Not one that’s not going to be cost-prohibitive to purchase a sole developer.Jesse: Yeah, I definitely recommend setting up those reactive billing alerts. They’re not going to solve all of your use cases here, but they’re definitely better than nothing. And the one that I definitely am thinking of that I would recommend turning on is the Cost Explorer Cost Anomaly Detector because that actually looks at your spend based on a specific service, a specific AWS cost category, a specific user-defined cost allocation tag. And it’ll tell you if there is a spike in spend. Now, if your spend is just continuing to grow steadily, Cost Anomaly Detector isn’t going to give you all the information you want.It’s only going to look for those anomalous spikes where all of a sudden, you turned something on that you meant to turn off, and left it on. But it’s still something that’s going to start giving you some feedback and information over time that may help you keep an eye on your billing usage and your spend.Amy: Another thing we highly recommend is to have a thorough tagging strategy, especially if you’re using a service to deploy resources. Because you want to make sure that all of your resources, you know what they do and you know who they get charged to. And Copilot does allow you to do resource tagging within it, and then from there should be able to convert them to cost allocation tags so you can see them in your console.Jesse: Awesome. Well, our next question is from Rob. Rob asks, “How do I stay HIPAA compliant, but keep my savings down? Do I re...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 14, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways that we have seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. I feel like it’s just kind of always necessary. There always has to be just that little bit of something extra; it’s the spice that really makes the dish. Today we’re going to be talking about the ‘Cloud Cost Management Team Starter Kit.’ Now, in a previous episode, we talked about the ‘Cloud Cost Management Starter Kit,’ which was a little bit more generalized, and one of the things that we talked about, ultimately, was building a team that is responsible for some of this work, some of this cloud cost management work.So today, we’re going to take that one step further; we’re going to talk about all of the things that your cloud cost management team should ultimately be responsible for, what it should look like, how you might want to start building that team within your organization. So, I’m going to kick us off. I think one of the first things that is so, so critical for any team that is going to be doing any work is buy-in at the executive leadership level. You need to make sure that engineering leadership, the C-suite leadership has your back in everything that you’re doing. You need to make sure that the work that you’re doing has been signed off at the highest level so that that leadership can help empower you to do your work.Amy: And we’ve referenced this before, and really, every time we talk about things like what makes a successful project is that as the one executing that project, you probably need the authority and actionable goals in order to do that, and the leadership is going to be the ones to lay that out for you.Jesse: Absolutely. If you don’t have the backing of leadership, whether it is your boss, whether it is the C-suite, whether it’s a VP suite, you’re not going to get other people to listen to what you have to say; you’re not going to get other people to, broadly speaking, generally speaking, care about the work that you’re trying to do, the work that you’re trying to incentivize and empower other people in the organization to do.Amy: And that kind of leads us into the next portion of it where you need to know what the responsibilities are and have that clear delineation so that you understand the things that is expected of you, what the engineering teams, what they’re expected to do, and product teams, and finance teams. Everyone has to have a pretty much fenced-in idea of what they’re allowed to do and what they are expected to deliver, just like in any project.Jesse: Absolutely. It’s so critical for me to understand what I’m responsible for, you to understand what you’re responsible for. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a meeting where somebody will say something generally like, “We should do X,” and then everyone nods and goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should do X.” And then everybody leaves the meeting and thinks that somebody else is responsible for it, and nobody’s been clearly assigned that work, or nobody knows that work is ultimately their responsibility.Amy: And if you don’t assign it, people are going to assume that this is going to be a thing that if they have time to, they’ll get to it. And we harp on it enough that whenever work is not prioritized, it is automatically deprioritized. That’s just the way task lists shake out, especially at the end of sprint meetings.Jesse: Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the other things that’s so important, too, is that it’s not just about assigning the work, but it’s about making sure that everybody who is involved in the conversation, everybody who’s involved in the work agrees on what those boundaries are, agrees on who is responsible for what actions, more specifically speaking from a task responsibility perspective. Because at the end of the day, I want my team, whether that is my individual team or a cross-functional team, to all be bought into who’s responsible for what parts of the project. We all need to be on the same page in terms of, “Yes, this is my responsibility. This part of the work is my responsibility. I will take ownership over this,” so that we can all help each other.Get that project goal together. One of the other big ideas that is so critical to starting a cloud cost management team is identifying and socializing your business KPI metrics. Now, this is something that some engineering teams already think about day-to-day. They might have ideas of service-level agreements, metrics, maybe service-level objective metrics, but there might be other business metrics that indirectly—or directly—relate to engineering work. It could be number of users using your SaaS platform, it could be number of API requests, it could be the amount of storage that customers are storing on your platform. You want to identify what these metrics are, and start measuring your cloud spend against these metrics.Amy: And as far as cost optimization projects go, the KPIs may not line up directly against how many servers you’re standing up, or how many users are coming through. They’ll be very indicative because you are spending money per user and per resource, but perhaps your business goals are different. Maybe you’re not looking at trying to save money, but better understand where that money is going.Jesse: Absolutely. It’s not just about how many instances are running per hour, it’s not just about how many servers are running per hour, or how many users per server. It’s really about understanding what are the core driving indicators of your business? What are the things that ultimately influence and impact how your workloads, and servers, and API functions, and everything, flow and grow and change over time?Amy: These metrics also can be influenced by things that are not architecturally specific, like savings plans, or the saving you would get through reservations, or some other contractual deal you get from your provider.Jesse: Yeah, that’s one of the hard things, too, that we always hear from our clients. There is this idea that they think that they are spending a certain amount of money because they’re getting discounts from savings plans, or from reserved instances or from an enterprise discount program, and maybe their usage is a lot higher than that, but because they get these discounts, they think that they’re actually using a lot less than they actually are. And while this is not something we’re talking about specifically or directly in this conversation, it is something to be mindful of because there definitely can be a difference between your usage and your overall spend if your company is investing in thin...

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-key-to-unlock-the-aws-billing-puzzle-is-architectureNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 7, 2021 with Corey Quinn.