AWS Morning Brief

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 10, 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: Today, on a very special episode of AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field, we say our goodbyes to Pete Cheslock.Amy: Oh, no. Did the ops bus finally get him?Jesse: No. Wait, what? What? No. No, he’s not—Amy: You know, the ops bus, the one that takes out all of the ops people, which is why you need data recovery plans.Jesse: [laugh]. I mean, I have plans for other reasons, but no. No, Pete, Pete’s not dead. He’s just—I mean, he’s dead to me, but he’s just not going to be here anymore.Amy: Only on the inside.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Arumbulo Negrette.Pete: I am Pete Cheslock. I’m here for one last, beautiful, glorious time.Jesse: I feel like this is going to be like Breakfast Club but in the data center server room.Pete: Yeah. A little bit. I think so. We will all sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, share our thoughts and feelings. And maybe some sushi. There were sushi in that movie. And that was, like, really advanced back then in the ’80s.Jesse: Yeah, I like that. So Pete, you want to give us a little bit of background about why you will be moving on from this podcast?Pete: Moving on to a whole new world. Yes. Sadly, I am not dead. The ops bus did not get me, and I was not eaten by my smoker, my meat smoker.Jesse: [laugh]. Although at this point, it’s probably overdue.Pete: You know, the odds of all three of those are pretty high out, to be really perfectly honest, given this pandemic and everything else going on in this world.Amy: Isn’t that how it works? You eventually become the smoked meat.Pete: Yeah, yeah.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: All the time. You know, you are what you eat. And if you eat junk and whatnot—so I eat smoked meats, eventually, I’m just going to become, you know, smoked meats, I guess. But no, I am moving on from The Duckbill Group. Just bittersweet is the best word I can come up with. Very sad, but also very excited.I’m moving on to a new role at a new company that was just kind of an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. And I’m really excited for something new, but really sad because I don’t get to work with two of my three favorite cloud economists, Jesse, and Amy. Yeah, Corey is one, too, and yes, it’s fun to work with him. But it’s also fun to rag on him a little bit as well.Jesse: I’m pretty sure you still have the opportunity to rag on him no matter where you go.Pete: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’re Twitter connected. So, I can just slide into his DMs as needed. Yeah.Amy: And really, what else is Twitter for—Pete: Exactly.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —than roasting former coworkers and bosses?Pete: Yeah, I expect a constant stream of Twitter DMs every time you find something, some little fun nugget that I’ve left behind.Jesse: I feel like that’s appropriate. So today, Pete, I have two questions for you now that you will be moving on from Duckbill Group, moving on from this podcast, I want to know, looking back at your time here working with Duckbill Group, what did you learn? What are the things that surprised you, that you didn’t expect? And what would you say to somebody who wanted to start working in this space, maybe start a career in cloud economics on their own?Pete: Yeah, so this kind of feels like an exit interview a little bit.Jesse: [laugh]. And a very public exit interview at that. So, make sure that we bleep all the swear words.Pete: I think it’s in Duckbill fashion to do a public—a very public-facing exit interview, right? That is Duckbill in a nutshell.Jesse: I think the only thing more public is if Corey asks you to hold the exit interview on Twitter.Amy: Exactly.Pete: [laugh]. I mean, we might have to do that, now. I like that idea. Yeah, so I think those are great questions, and I love the opportunity to talk about it. Because Duckbill is a fantastic company, and coming into Duckbill last year was totally by luck.Not really—no, not—luck is maybe not the right word. But I had been doing some consulting on my own, and the pandemic and some other forces caused a bunch of my consulting work to dry up really quickly. And I was sitting at home and I’m like, “Wow, I should get a real job.” And I saw a tweet from Mike on Twitter that was like, “Oh, we’re growing The Duckbill Group.” And Mike and Corey and I have known each other for such a long time.We’ve always said it’d be great to work together at some point in the future, but it’s so hard [laugh] to do. You know, to kind of work with your friends, and timing, and circumstance, and schedule, and everything else. And so when I saw that, I was like, wow, like that might be a lot of fun working with that crew. And I’ve got a lot of experience in AWS and I’ve—my title at one of my previous companies was Captain COGS—for Cost Of Goods Sold—because I was so diligent with the Amazon bill. So, it’s kind of one of those things where I felt like I could be useful and helpful to the organization, and talking with Mike and Corey, it just made a ton of sense.And so, it was a lot of fun to come on board. So, but then once you’re kind of in, and you start doing this type of work—and you know, Amy and Jesse, you’ve both experienced this—I think no matter how much knowledge you have of Amazon, very, very quickly, you realize that you actually don’t know as much as you really think you did, right?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Because it’s so—there’s just so much.Amy: And it changes once every five minutes.Pete: [laugh].Jesse: Oh, yeah.Amy: Literally if you—well, just keep an eye on that changelog, you can watch your day get ruined as time goes on.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. It’s—yeah, it’s a real-time day ruining. And that’s the new. It’s like Amazon Kinesis: It’s all real-time.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Yeah, it’s so true. And I think the reason behind it is, you know, one...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 3, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Cloud FinOps: https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-FinOps-Collaborative-Real-Time-Management/dp/1492054623FinOps Foundation: https://www.Finops.org/AWS cost management blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/Mastering AWS Cost Optimization: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-AWS-Cost-Optimization-operational/dp/965572803XTranscriptCorey: 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.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: Wow, we’re back again. And guess what? We have even more questions. I am… I am… I don’t even know. I have so many emotions right now that are conflicting between a pandemic and non-pandemic that I just—I’m just so happy. I’m just so happy that you listen, all of you out there, all you wonderful humans out there are listening. But more importantly, you are going into lastweekinaws.com/QA and you’re sending us some really great questions.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And we’re going to answer some more questions today. We’re having so much fun with this, that we’re just going to keep the good times rolling. So, if you also want to keep these good times rolling, send us your questions, and we’ll just—yeah, we’ll just roll with it. Right, Jesse?Jesse: Absolutely. We’re happy to answer more questions on air, happy to let you pick our brains.Pete: All right. Well, we got a couple more questions. Let’s kick it off, Jesse.Jesse: Yeah. So, the first question today is from Barry. Thank you, Barry. “New friend of the pod here.” Always happy to have friends of the pod. Although I do feel like that starts to get, like, Children of the Corn, kind of. I think we started that, and I also am excited about it, and also upset with myself for starting that.Pete: That’s all right. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod.Jesse: “New friend of the pod here. I work in strategic sourcing and procurement and I was curious if there are any ways that you recommend to get up to speed with managing cloud spend. This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product, but I can see a significant potential value for a sourcing professional to help, also.” And that’s from Barry, thank you, Barry.Pete: Well, I’m struggling not to laugh. “This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product.”Jesse: Yeah…Pete: But I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not monitored by anyone. It’s just running up a meter in a taxi going 100 miles an hour.Jesse: Yeah, that’s the hardest part. I want everybody to be involved in the cloud cost management practice, but there’s that same idea of if it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility. And so this usually ends up at a point where you’ve got the CFO walking over to the head of engineering saying, “Why did the spend go up?” And that’s never a good conversation to have.Pete: No, never a good one. Well, Barry because you’re a friend of the pod, we will answer this question for you. And honestly, I think it’s a great question, which is, we actually have been working with a lot of larger enterprises and these enterprises still have their classic sourcing and procurement teams. That’s not an expertise that is going away anytime soon, but like most teams within the company that are adopting cloud, it’s obviously going to evolve as people are moving away from, kind of, capital intensive purchases and into, honestly, more complex, multi-year OpEx style purchases, with cloud services and all the different vendors that come with it. It’s going to just get a lot harder.I mean, it’s probably already a lot harder for those types of teams. And so there’s a bunch of places I think that you can go that can help level up your skills around cloud spend. And I would say the first place that I personally got to dive in a little bit more—I mean, my history has been using Amazon cloud and being a person who cared about how much my company spent on it, but when you—joining Duckbill, you need to dive into other areas around the FinOps world. And the book, the O’Reilly book, Cloud FinOps is actually a really great resource.Yeah, I think it’s really well written and there’s a lot of great chapters within there that you can kind of pick and choose based on what you’re most interested in learning about. If you’re trying to learn more about unit economics, or you’re trying to learn more about how to monitor and track things like that, it’s a great book to dive into, and becomes a really great reference that you can leverage as you’re trying to level up this expertise within yourself or your team.Jesse: It’s a really, really great resource. The other thing to think about is any kind of collaborative social spaces where you can be with like-minded individuals who also care about cloud costs. Now, there’s a number of meetups that exist under the FinOps title that may be worth looking into. Obviously, we’re recording this during the pandemic so I don’t recommend doing those in person. But as you are able to, there may be opportunities for in-person meetups and smaller local groups focusing on cloud cost management strategies together. But also check out the FinOps Foundation. They have a Slack space that I would love to tell you more about, but unfortunately, we’re not allowed to join. So—Pete: Yep.Jesse: —I can’t really say more about it than that. I would hope that you’re allowed to join, but they have some strict guidelines. So, I mean, the worst that can happen is they say no; it’s definitely worth signing up.Pete: Yeah, and they have to us. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah.Pete: I think when you get into the FinOps Foundation, you should angrily say that we should have more FinOps experts in here like the great Jesse DeRose should be a member of this one because right now, he’s just framed his rejection notice from there, and—Jesse: Oh, yeah.Pete: —while it looks beautiful on the wall, while I’m on a Zoom with him, I want more for you, Jesse.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.Never 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 April 26th 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/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.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. We’re back again, my name is Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose. So, happy to be back in the studio after our whirlwind tour of the Unconventional Guide that I feel like we’ve been on for roughly as long as the pandemic’s been going on at this point; probably a little bit less. But lots of really great content there that we were happy to talk about, and I’m happy to be moving on to some other topics.Pete: Yeah, absolutely. And the topics, we actually get to move on to some of our favorite topics, which are answering your questions. And it turns out, Jesse, there’s more than two people that listen to us. There’s a lot of you; there are dozens of you out there, and we love it.Jesse: You like me. You really like me.Pete: So, great. So, great to see. We’ve been getting tons of fantastic questions, a few of which we’re going to answer right now. You can also have your question answered by going over to the lastweekinaws.com/QA and enter in your question there. You can enter in your name, or you can leave it blank, or you could just put something funny there. Anything works. We’re happy to dive in deeper on any particular topic, again, whether it’s about this recent Unconventional Guide series or just something you’re curious about in your day-to-day in your cost management life.Jesse: Today’s questions are really great because they ultimately get at the practical side of all of our recommendations. Because I feel like every single time I subscribe to one of those self-help books or blogs and I read all these really great short, sweet tidbits, I think to myself, “This is perfect. I’ll go apply this to everything in my life.” But then doing the actual work part is so much harder. Where do you even start with that first step once you’ve got the big picture grand idea? So, today we’ve got some really, really great questions, focusing on the best ways to get started on your cloud cost management journey. So, let’s start off with these questions.First question is, “Could you cover some practical approaches to applying some of your Cost Management Guide? A lot of your suggestions sound simple on paper, but in practice, they become quite complicated.” So, true. Absolutely, absolutely a concern. “I’ve had some success pulling in a small group of subject matter experts together for short periods of time focusing on low risk, easy things to do. How have you approached actually doing this? What meetings do you set up? What do you take for notes? How do you document your savings? How do you find new opportunities?” That’s from Brian O. Brian O., That’s a really, really great question.The other one that I want to add to this: “We’re a big AWS shop, and I’ve spent some time inside the AWS beast in the past, and I still struggle with multi-account multi-region data transfer in general, but specifically analyzing cost and usage. There are examples specifically like if data transfer out goes up $25,000 last month, how do you attribute that? How do you know where to apply that? How do you know what ultimately prompted that spend? Love how you work through these types of challenges. What is relatively easy at a single account level gets exponentially more complex with every account and region we function in.” So, true. And that’s from Todd. Thank you, Todd. In both cases, absolutely true.There’s this really great idea of we can give you the really short and sweet things to think about, but taking those first steps for practically applying these ideas is tough, and it needs to scale over time. And not every practice does.Pete: Yeah, these are great questions. I, kind of, am remembering that meme that was around for a while, which was, how to draw an owl. “First, draw two circles, and then, you know, you draw the rest of the owl.”Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And honestly, oftentimes, some of the stuff even that we say, Jesse, feels that way, and it doesn’t intend to come across that way. It’s just, we could bore you all on a multi-hour long recording of some of these topics. I mean, we do this with our clients, and our clients pay for this pleasure [laugh] for us to put them to sleep with our soft tones of the cloud cost management world. But I think the reality is that it is complex and there are probably unlikely to be quick wins in a lot of these places. One thing that we found is honestly, monitoring, visibility, I think all the cool kids are calling it observability now—Jesse: [laugh].Pete: —you know, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but CloudWatch is actually probably one of the best cloud cost reduction tools that exist out there. There are so many services within AWS that you’re probably using today, that by default, report data to CloudWatch. And those statistics are potentially a huge place to identify resources that are over-provisioned and underused, idle resources, things like that. I can’t tell you how many times that I will go into a client account, and one of the first places I go to is—after Cost Explorer—is probably CloudWatch. So, monitoring spend and monitoring what’s happening there is kind of a great way to get started on that cloud cost idea because you’re getting charged for everything that happens, so knowing what’s happening, and knowing how it’s changing over time is a great way to start understanding and reducing it.Jesse: Yeah. And I think AWS is probably also using some of those CloudWatch metrics in their optimization recommendations that they make within their own optimization tooling. And it’s probably just not clearly defined or clearly outlined for AWS customers to be able to use the same metrics. So, I feel like if my Compute Optimizer could quickly load or link to a graph that showed me low CPU utilization across a number of instances, that’s a really handy way for me to start using more of CloudWatch’s metrics.Pete: Yeah, I think Compute Optimizer is honestly, criminally underused out there. I don’t know why. Then honestly, one of the other complaints is like, “Well, you can’t get memory statistics unless you have a CloudWatch Agent.” Yes. So honestly, install the CloudWatch agent; have it report up, the, like, one or two memory metrics that Compute Optimizer needs to make a recommendation and the cost will more than pay for itself.