Welcome back to another edition of Just the Links. Please feel free to forward this post to your colleagues and encourage them to subscribe. As always we appreciate your feedback so let us know how we’re doing. Find something interesting you’d like to share? Leave a comment and let us know.
A Quick Word…
This past week I was invited to speak on a panel for the FinOps Foundation regarding enabling engineers to take action on cost optimization efforts. This topic was a result of the number one concern as listed in the State of FinOps 2021 report. While we covered a lot of ground there is one point I would like to underscore because I don’t think I did a sufficient job during the panel: good engineers care about the product and they care about the company. They should be open and receptive to any opportunities to make the product and the company better. If they aren’t then this is most likely a cultural problem and should be addressed at the top.
Engineers, by their very nature, love to solve problems and cost optimization is just another problem to solve. If they are not willing to solve this problem then there are other factors in play and it would behoove the organization to figure out what those factors are. This is not a “don’t blame us” position at all. Leadership, finance, and architects should be leaning on their engineers more to solve these problems and put the organization into a better position. However if your engineering staff is acting counter to this then that is a major cultural problem that must be fixed.
Just the Links - Volume 5
How to optimize AWS CloudTrail costs by using advanced event selectors
CloudTrail is chatty, even though it’s required in many respects including operations and compliance. This shows how to only capture the events that are meaningful for you.
AWS Commitment Discounts in the Cloud Whitepaper
To help customers purchase the most suitable commitments for their business. The survey of data characteristics were especially eye-opening.
AWS Beats Azure on SQL Server Price for Performance
An interesting study that shows SQL Server performs better on AWS than Azure all compute facets being equal.
DataStax is now offering a serverless DBaaS
Basically, Cassandra has been broken up to run on a series of microservices.
Google admits k8s container technology is so complex it had to roll out an Autopilot feature to do it all for you
Before you jump on the k8s thinking it’s some magic bullet, consider the potential cost of management and administrative overhead.
Azure Cost Management and Billing Updates for February 2021
Azure Government pay-as-you-go general availability
Cost allocation preview for Azure Government
Cost insights
Cost Management Lab updates
New ways to save money with Azure
New learning material
Documentation updates
Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure
A break down of speed, integrations, support, and costs between Azure and Snowflake.
Demystifying cloud economics
Azure’s take on cloud pricing and understanding workloads and their costs.
Joe Daly on All Cloud, No Breaks Podcast
The very awesome Joe Daly talks FinOps Foundation, driving business value, unit economics, and hold my beer IT.
Google Cloud BigQuery Cost Estimation
A step-by-step guide for estimating costs. Very detailed and easy to follow.
Deploying to Azure Kubernetes Services
Good lab covering k8s deployment. Compares pretty well to AWS EKS.
Serverless Rust Testing
Because performance translates to dollars every time.
The Many Ways Companies Waste Money With Technology Spending (Paywalled)
Gartner states that organizations are over-spending on average 40%. We need to do a better job, folks.
Why Cloud Technology Is Expected to Dominate 2021
More “everyone to the cloud, now!” cheerleading.
CloudFix is a new Cost Optimization Software
Promises to automatically find and remediate opportunities.
Surfacing VM Costs in Azure Managed Applications
I’m not an Azure ARM guy, and I’d love to know if this truly works.
When do cloud savings start to kick in?
Peter does a good job of breaking down the optimization lifecycle into understandable chunks, in simple terms, and what to expect - good and bad.
Selecting a unit metric to support your business
Getting this correct is super important. It has to align with your business OKRs. Fortunately for us engineers the business side probably has already done this for you. If not, you should be asking for it.
Lower Cost Storage Classes for EFS
New storage tiers: EFS One-Zone and One-Zone IA (infrequent access) provides a 47% cost reduction over standard tiers.