AWS Morning Brief

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 29, 2021with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management: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. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: Fridays From the Field. Triple F.Jesse: Wooo.Pete: It’s going to be a thing. We’re working on it. And you can follow along this Unconventional Guide by going to the duckbillgroup.com. Website, you can download this entire Unconventional Guide as a handy PDF. We’ll include the link in our [show notes 00:00:33]. It’s a really long link that I’m not going to read out here.Jesse: Is it wrong that I want Rebecca Black’s, “Friday” to be our opening intro music now?Pete: Oh, yeah. That would be, actually, pretty good. I feel like the cost of licensing that might be a little higher than we want to bear. But I don’t know, maybe there’s some sort of fair use thing that we could do with it.Jesse: I like it. We’ll think about it.Pete: Well, you know what? We can all just sing it in our heads. And that’s a good way to get it—Jesse: [laugh].Pete: —very cost-effective way.Jesse: We know that you’re groaning as much as we’re groaning, and that’s what’s important.Pete: That is very true. So, today, we are talking about why are you still paying retail prices for your Amazon usage? And maybe you’re sitting there going, “Well, what else would I pay?” Well, you’d pay less than that, right?Jesse: Yeah. Last week, we talked about reservations and savings plans, reserved instances. And that’s really important, but today we’re talking about something a little bit different than that. Reservations are still important and still, potentially, part of this conversation, but it’s possible to not pay retail prices. You have to think about it in the same way that you’re thinking about reservations: you have to be willing to make investments into your cloud spend, into your cloud usage.Pete: So, we mentioned this in a previous episode, that no matter how much your spend is, from a couple of dollars a month all the way up to hundreds of millions of dollars a month, you have an account manager with AWS. You may have never met them, but there is someone that is specifically assigned to you. And the reason for this is that every big-spending client out there starts as a small-spending client, if you’re a startup, you might be spending $10,000 a month. That can be a huge amount of money for your business, but Amazon knows that next year, you’re probably going to spend more than that. And so everyone gets an account manager, and that account management team is there to help you improve your bill. And by that I mean, help you spend less when it’s possible. So, the way they do this is by helping investing in this relationship. They want you to save money. And I’m not making a funny here, that may sound like a very strange topic. But Amazon doesn’t want you to spend your money wastefully. That makes for angry customers. Right, Jesse?Jesse: Yeah, this is ultimately something that I see come up again and again. AWS’s account management team really wants to help you; their job is literally to help you. This relationship is super, super important, and can manifest in a number of different ways: it can manifest in your account manager trying to set you up with a solutions architect or technical account manager to use more AWS services; it can be talking about some of the discounts that we’re going to talk about today; it could be a whole slew of things, maybe credits to move or migrate from your data center into AWS. That’s when we’ve seen a couple times with a couple different clients of ours.Pete: Yes, specifically, we’re talking about one of the most well-known, I guess, of all of the discount programs inside of Amazon called the Enterprise Discount Program. This is often referred to as an EDP. And you might have an Enterprise Discount Program—this is actually separate from something called an Enterprise Agreement which is just, I believe, some shared legal agreements of how you will operate on the platform. This is actually broader than that. This is both Amazon and your business committing to certain terms—so legal is going to get involved; it’s going to be some legal requirements that are needed—but at the end of the day, this is how you can get a discount on your spend, just a straight, broad, cross-service discount that applies to all of your spend—for the most part. I say ‘all’ but for a majority of your spend within Amazon.Jesse: So, now you’re thinking to yourself, “Fantastic. How do I sign up, sign up? Shut up and take my money.” So, there’s levels to this. We’ve usually seen clients or AWS customers, whose spend exceeds $1 million per year. That’s usually the sweet spot where your account manager will step in and say, “Hey. Hello. Hi, how are you?”Pete: Yeah. That’s where you get the introduction because at that spend, yeah, okay, you’re at—what—$100,000 a month, at least? Six figures a month, that’s real spend. That’s real spend that’s probably not going to go away anytime soon. And it’s spend that probably is going to increase in the coming years.Jesse: And even if you’re not at $1 million per year, you can still start that conversation with your account manager today. They can still tell you what are the levers that you have in order to become part of this EDP program? What are the levers that you have to start getting discounts on your usage today?Pete: So, something we see a lot of, we actually help a lot of our clients, hold their hand through this negotiation process, and help our clients negotiate on their behalf to improve their discounts. And a good number of our clients actually, will preemptively negotiate these contracts in advance of their spend growing on Amazon, basically making these multi-year commitments because maybe they’ve just closed a deal with a large customer, they’re expecting some future growth and they want to make sure that they can get the biggest discount possible. And that’s what an EDP can do is, basically you’re saying, “I commit to spending a certain amount of money per year, and in exchange, I will get a discount.” Now, there’s a lot of nuances here, but the key thing is that when you make that commitment—let...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 22, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

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

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 15, 2021, with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/Building Successful Communities of Practice: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Communities-Practice-Webber/dp/095749193XTranscriptCorey: 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.Corey: Ever notice how security tends to be one of those things that isn’t particularly welcoming to folks who don’t already have the word ‘security’ somewhere in their job title? Introducing our fix to that, Meanwhile in Security. To sign up for the newsletter or to find the podcast, visit meanwhileinsecurity.com. Coming soon, from The Duckbill Group.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. This is Fridays From The Field, hashtag-triple-F. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose, and I have a question: is it hashtag-triple-F, or is it hashtag-F-F-F? Are we spelling out triple F in this hashtag, or is it just literally three Fs?Pete: The three Fs is a little triggering for me for me, with my high school grades, so let’s just stick to—Jesse: [laugh].Pete: —hashtag—Jesse: —triple-F.Pete: Triple-F, I think, just has a better flow to it. But that’s a good—it’s a good point in our continued effort to make triple-F—hashtag-triple-f a thing.Jesse: All of our audience members were really concerned about that one because they’ve been trying to get us trending on Twitter, but they weren’t really sure, was it triple-F. Or was it F-F-F, or was it something in between?Pete: Exactly. It’s just bad. But we’re going to keep trying at it, and we’ll see what happens. Well, anyway, we are back again to continue our Unconventional Guide to Cost Optimization on AWS with another listener question. And unlike the last time we did listener questions, this question actually came in during our Unofficial Guide, which means we actually have one listener this series. Because we can’t count the last one that was from way before. So, to this one listener, thank you, thank you for listening.Jesse: Just that one listener. Just you. Thank you.Pete: Yeah, just you. Everyone else, no, we’re not going to, we’re not going to thank you at all. But if you want to be our second listener, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA and give us a question. What do you want to know more about? What can we dive in a lot deeper on any of these topics we’re talking about? It’s complex stuff, and we’re all learning this, we’re all trying to figure out what works best. And not every company is the same. And that’s what I actually love about this question because this question actually came in from someone who didn’t put their name—but that’s okay—they work in the public sector, which is why they didn’t put their name in there. And they had a pretty interesting question. So, Jesse, maybe you can read this off for us and let us know what we’re going to be answering today.Jesse: Yeah. This question is, “We’re an Azure shop, partly cloud on the way, however, we’re also becoming an Oracle OCI shop”—I’m so sorry—“And an AWS shop, and well, it’s public sector, so one-of-everything cloud provider. How do we convince management that cloud is a different thing than on-prem and needs some kind of cloud team? I dislike the phrase DevOps as a job title, but we need something to change the current model where nearly all of this work is outsourced to a quote-unquote, ‘managed service provider?’” Oof. I have so many feelings.Pete: I would imagine. I mean, I was immediately—I felt called out, you know? Just @ me next time, public sector coward with the DevOps-as-a-job-title phrase.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: They often say that only a DevOps tool, I guess—wait, what’s the term? It’s like, “A DevOps tool would give themselves a DevOps as a job title.” Of course, that’s often said about me because I gave myself a title called ‘DevOps Director’ or ‘Director of DevOps.’ Either way, you phrase it, it’s all pretty bad.Jesse: Yeah. So, there’s a couple of different questions in this, and we’re going to dive into each of them individually. But really, really quick, I want to talk about multi-cloud because that’s kind of the underlying discussion here; something that is not necessarily the focus, but let’s talk about multi-cloud. Why is multi-cloud a thing? Why is it an important thing that you should be thinking about?Pete: Multi-cloud is an interesting topic that could go a lot of different ways. And I call multi-cloud a lot different than hybrid cloud. I think most people are probably doing hybrid cloud, meaning you’ve got some data centers—because it takes you years and years and years to move off of those—and you’ve also got cloud workloads, or maybe you’ve got some data centers and you’re bursting up to cloud workloads; that’s pretty cool, too. I think of multi-cloud as individual applications being deployed to the cloud vendor and cloud provider, based on maybe price or features or things like that. And honestly there, a lot of the cloud providers are getting closer in feature sets. But for example, I might want to use Lambda, but I may not want to suffer high cost of data transfer. So, can I build an application that leverages Lambda, but maybe leverages the extremely low cost of Oracle’s OCI data transfer? That made the news when Zoom signed that big contract with Oracle, it was largely driven by network data transfer. So, there are some reasons why multi-cloud might be a thing.Jesse: And we’ve definitely seen multi-cloud in practice with some of our clients. But I also want to call out the caveat that the clients that were doing this were very mature in their cloud cost practices. So, kudos to those clients because they’re doing amazing, amazing work. But it takes time to really build up a mature, scalable, optimized, multi-cloud strategy.Pete: Yeah, exactly. And I think the biggest challenge is that we see is, on the one hand, if you say to yourself, “I’m going multi-cloud, therefore, I will only consume core primitives like compute, block, store, object store, networking,” even though all the providers will provide you those services, obviously, the APIs to interact with them will be wildly different, but most importantly, the authentication models are going to be wildly different, how you authenticat...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 8, 2021 with Corey Quinn.