AWS Morning Brief

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 31, 2021, with Corey Quinn.

Links:Ted Talk: The Science of Productive ConflictTranscriptCorey: 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.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, we’re going to talk about the people side of technical projects, especially people who might introduce roadblocks for completing technical projects. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Jesse, Amy, that sounds like it is not about AWS.” But let me assure you that any project involving AWS is going to involve multiple different personalities approaching the project from different angles, who ultimately all have the same solution in mind, but have different ideas about how to get that problem done, or different ideas about what’s the right thing that ultimately get done to begin with. So today, we want to talk about that: we want to dive into how can you have really rewarding conversations with those folks? How can you better engage people who are intentionally or unintentionally difficult?Amy: We want to be very clear that we are not trying to come after anyone. Every time that I’ve gotten an engagement, it isn’t because someone means to be difficult, but maybe there’s a project timeline, maybe there’s something else getting in the way of them being able to fully be present for that specific part of the engagement, and maybe that’s just what’s causing friction, causing speed bumps. And we’re all well aware of this. Jobs are hard, and especially this sort of work can be difficult. So, first of all, we totally understand, and this is just more about how to get everyone moving in the same direction at the same pace.Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially with the pandemic going on right now, everybody’s doing remote work, some people have never actually met their teammates in person and they’re expected to work together efficiently, and quickly, and easily. It’s hard.Amy: It also doesn’t help that when we do come in, we come in under the context of a cost optimization project, or some other efficiency-type title. And that sounds a little like the Bobs from Office Space, which I bring up a lot, especially during internal meetings. And it makes it sound like we’re going to come in to shake a bunch of things up and look for inefficiencies where there aren’t any, which is truly not the case. And it can cause a lot of insecurity, especially about how someone thinks that they’re doing their job, or that their job is somehow going to be impacted by what our suggestions are. It may not just be us, but it may be another migration consultation suite, where someone’s coming in to change the architecture that they’ve worked on for a long time, and that can put a lot of people in a state of unease.Jesse: And I think it’s also important to note that it’s not just about an external party coming in like Duckbill Group or another external, third-party consulting service, or technical group. It could be an internal separate team. It could be your internal cloud cost management team that is starting conversations with development teams saying, “Hey, I want to better understand how you’re using AWS. I want to understand some of these cost optimization opportunities.” Even in situations like that where all of these conversations are internal within the company, even within teams, there are still multiple different personalities, multiple different people approaching the problem from different angles, and it’s still really, really important to make sure that you approach them collaboratively.Amy: And ultimately, we wanted to be clear that what we’re going to be talking about is helping people think differently into a growth mindset, and being able to do this work without anyone feeling shame or embarrassment.Jesse: Yeah. Growth mindset is so critical. It’s something that I love to talk about ad nauseum, and so I won’t dive into it too deeply here, but—Amy: That’s another episode.Jesse: [Laugh]. Exactly. Growth mindset is so important for folks in technology teams, especially in today’s technology era where there’s just so much constantly innovating. There’s so much new constantly going on around you, to new technologies, new teams, new ideas, new ways of doing things, new processes, new tools; it’s reall

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 24, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Transcript Corey: 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.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, we’re going to be talking about build versus buy. I feel like this is really kind of a classic engineering conversation. Amy, what is the build versus buy idea?Amy: It’s really the idea of whether you decide to use a managed service or SaaS product versus rolling your own and building yourself. It’s very easy to do these days with a few watches on YouTube, maybe some blog articles. You can also do repairs on my house, which is why I always have to get repairs done on my house. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, I feel like as much as I love the world of HGTV and the DIY network, I think I can do more than I actually can and I feel like it’s probably a lot safer to just let a professional take the reins. I mean, there’s so many certification programs that teach you how to build and manage your own engineering things, your own distributed databases, your own Kubernetes clusters, your own streaming data platform, and it’s really great to understand the fundamental building blocks of these systems, it’s really great to understand how they work so that ultimately if you are consuming from them or managing them, that you understand the ins and the outs of the system. But the question becomes, do you really need to be the one that’s managing that system? Do you really need to be the one spending your time managing that system on top of writing code for your microservices, on top of managing the architecture, the application, all of the components of your service that are critical?Amy: So, I guess what we really want to decide is, in what use cases is it okay to build something from scratch, and when is it okay to, essentially, just go to the market and look for something that’s made already?Jesse: Yeah. And I think that’s the main question that a lot of folks ask: what is the defining line? What are the questions they should think about as they are choosing to build versus buy?Amy: I think if you want to really look at building a product, and really from the ground up—you have this product in mind and you want to do all the architecture, control it end-to-end—unless this is your core product feature or you’re going to package it for either internal or public release, you almost always—you don’t want to build this yourself because someone has probably built it in a way that’s not going to cause your engineers time or money. Unless it is going to directly make you money, then yes. If this is tied to your product income and your product revenue, please build it yourself. It avoids a lot of licensing issues, you do get to control how it works, how you want it to work. But that said a lot of products, just a bunch of assassins in a trench coat anyway, so—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —it really depends on what’s important to you.Jesse: Yeah, I feel like this is one of the biggest pitfalls that I see in a lot of organizations where they think about how they want to build out an architecture and they choose that a solution like, stateful distributed service is going to be the right thing that they want. And one of the developers says, “Oh, that’s easy. I can build that in a weekend.” And then they go off and build it, and then they’re stuck managing that system for all of eternity when that’s not the primary purpose of the team that they’re working on, that’s not the primary purpose of the product that they’re working on. So, if you’re going to build something that is directly related to your product, directly related to your business use case, directly related to how your company is making money, something that is absolutely your bread and butter, you definitely want to build that rather than buying that off the shelf.Because building it will give you that great opportunity to focus on controlling all the ins and outs of the system, understanding all the parts of the system, finding the flexibility when you need flexibility, really fine-tuning and honing all the parts of the system in the way that you need it to work so that ultimately your organization is getting the best bang for their buck out of the system, whereas in a lot of cases, you’re not going to get

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 17, 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: 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 we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure because I mean, who doesn’t love to complain about AWS? I feel like that’s always a good thing that we can talk about, no matter the topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about the ‘cloud cost management starter kit.’ So, the starter kit seems to be a big fad that’s going around. If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably thinking, “It’s already done. It’s over.”But I still want to talk about it. I think that this is a really relevant topic because I think a lot of companies are trying to get started, get their hands started in cloud cost management. So, I think this would be a great thing for us to talk about: what’s in our cloud cost management starter kit?Amy: And it really will help answer that question that I get asked a lot on: what is even a cloud economist, and what do you do?Jesse: Yeah, I mean, given the current timeframe, I haven’t gone to any parties recently to talk about what I do, but I do feel like anytime I try to explain to somebody what I do, there’s always that moment of, “Okay. Yes, I work with computers, and we’ll just leave it at that.”Amy: It’s easier to just think about it as we look at receipts, and we kind of figure things out. But when you try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a very esoteric idea that we’re trying to explain. And no, I don’t know why this is a real job. And yet it is.Jesse: This is one of the things that always fascinates me. I absolutely love the work that I do, and I definitely think that it is important work that needs to be done for any organization, to work on their cloud cost management best practices, but it also boggles my mind that AWS, Azure, GCP, haven’t figured out how to bake this in more clearly and easily to all of their workflows and all their services. It still boggles my mind that this is something that exists as—Amy: As a thing we have to do.Jesse: As a thing we have to do. Yeah, absolutely.Amy: Well, the good news is, they’re going to change their practices once every six weeks, and we’ll have a new thing to figure it out. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. So, let’s get started with the first item on our cloud cost management starter kit. This one is something that Amy is definitely passionate about; I am definitely passionate about, as well. Amy, what is it?Amy: Turn on your CUR. Turn on your CUr. If you don’t know what it is, just Google AWS CUR. Turn it on. It will save you a headache, and it will save anyone you bring in to help you [laugh] [unintelligible 00:02:59] a huge headache. And it keeps us from having to yell at people, even though that’s the thing that if you pay us to do it, we will totally do it for you.Jesse: If you take nothing away from this episode, go check out the AWS Cost and Usage Report—otherwise known as CUR—turn it on for your accounts, ideally enable it in Parquet format because that’s going to allow you to get all that sweet, sweet data in an optimized manner, living in your S3 bucket. It is a godsend. It gives you all the data from Cost Explorer, and then some. It allows you to do all sorts of really interesting business intelligence analytics on your billing data. It’s absolutely fantastic.Amy: It’s like getting all of those juicy infrastructure metrics, except getting that with a dollar sign attached to it so you know what you actually doing with that money.Jesse: Yeah, this definitely is, like, the first step towards doing any kind of showback models, or chargeback models, or even unit economics to figuring out where your spend is going. The Cost and Usage Report is going to be a huge first step in that direction.Amy: Now, the reason why we yell at people about this—or at least I do—is because AWS will only show you the data from the time that it is turned on. They do have it for historical periods, but if you enable it at a specific point, all of your reports are going to start there. So, if you’re looking to do forecasting, or you want to be able to know what your usage is going to be looking like from this point on, turn it on as early as possible.Jesse: Absolutely. If you are listening to this now and you don’t have the CUR enabled, definitel

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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, bu

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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 become

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 comple

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 19, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/Migrate from Oracle to Amazon Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/migrate-oracle-to-amazon-aurora/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. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: We’re coming at you again with some more listener questions from the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management. I’m excited. People are listening to us, Jesse.Jesse: This is fantastic. I’m really excited that we have one fan. I’ve always wanted one fan.Pete: Well, two fans now. Maybe even more because we keep getting questions. And you can also be one of our Friends of the Pod by going to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And you can give us some feedback, you can give us a question and, like, will totally answer it because we like Friends of the Pod.Jesse: We may or may not enter you into a raffle to get a Members Only jacket that’s branded with ‘Friends with the Pod.’Pete: We should get some pins made, maybe.Jesse: Ohh…Pete: I think that's a good idea.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: So, what are we answering today, or attempting to answer for our listener, Jesse?Jesse: So today, we’ve got a really great question from [Godwin 00:01:20]. Thank you, Godwin, Godwin writes, “I truly believe that the system that I support is, like, a data hoarder. We do a lot of data ingestion, we recently did a lift-and-shift of the system to AWS, we use an Oracle database. The question is, how do I segregate the data and start thinking about moving it out of traditional relational databases and into other types of databases? Presently, our method is all types of data goes into a quote-unquote, ‘all-purpose database,’ and the database is growing quite fast. Where should I get started?”Pete: Well, I just want to commend you for a lift-and-shift into Amazon. That’s a Herculean feat, no matter what you’re lifting and shifting over. Hopefully, you have maybe started to decommission those original data centers and you don’t just have more data in twice as many locations.Jesse: [laugh]. But I also want to call out well done for thinking about not just the lift-and-shift, but the next step. I feel like that’s the thing that a lot of people forget about. They think about the lift-and-shift, and then they go, “Awesome. We’re hybrid. We’re in AWS, now. We’re in our data center. We’re good. Case closed.” And they forget that there’s a lot more work to do to modernize all those workloads in AWS, once you’ve lifted and shifted. And this is part of that conversation.Pete: Yeah, that’s a really good point because I know we’ve talked about this in the past, the lift-and-shift shot clock: when you don’t start migrating, start modernizing those applications to take advantage of things that are more cloud-native, the technical debt is really going to start piling up, and the folks that are going to manage that are going to get more burnt out, and it really is going to end poorly. So, the fact you’re starting to think about this now is a great thing. Also, what is available to you now that you’re on AWS is huge compared to a traditional data center.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And that’s not just talking about the—I don’t even know if I’ve ever counted how many different databases exist on Amazon. I mean, they have a database for, at this point, every type of data. I mean, is there a type of data that they’re going to create, just so that they can create a database to put it into?Jesse: Wouldn’t surprise me at this point.Pete: They’ll find a way [laugh] to come up with that charge on your bill. But when it comes to Oracle, specifically Oracle databases, there’s obviously a big problem in not only the cost of the engine, running the database on a RDS or something to that effect, but you have licensing costs that are added into it as well. Maybe you have a bring-your-own-license or maybe you’re just using the off-the-shelf, but the off-the-shelf, kind of, ‘retail on-demand pricing’ RDS—I’m using air quotes for all these things, but you can’t see that—they will just have the licensing costs baked in as well. So, you’re paying for it—kind of—either way.Jesse: And I think this is something also to think about that we’ll dive into in a minute, but one of the things that a lot of people forget about when they move into AWS says that you’re no

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 12, 2021 with 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: Fridays From the Field. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: We’re back again. And we’re here. We made it, Jesse.Jesse: I was worried. This was a journey. Thank you, everybody, for coming on this journey with us.Pete: It was quite an experience going through the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Savings. We’ve made it. I just can’t believe we’re here.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: So, what are we talking about today for the culmination of our magnum opus of cost savings optimizations?Jesse: This is a fun one. And I know I keep saying that this is my favorite about everyone, but I have to admit that this one, this topic today probably is my absolute favorite. This one I get really nerdy over. Today, we’re talking about how to predict your future and make your CFO happy. No—spoiler alert—there are not any crystal balls involved in this one. There’s no stock market conversations.This is talking about how you can use all of the different things that we’ve talked about throughout the course of this Unconventional Guide to really bring it all together into a couple ideas that will help you better understand your cloud costs, and really better understand your business, I think.Pete: Yeah. All of the things we talked about really lead up to this one, which is the clients of ours that are the most mature, who are incredibly optimized in their Amazon usage, are the ones who have adopted a majority of these specific items. They all lead to this last one, that ability to predict your future usage based on something that’s happening internally, or if a salesperson comes to you and says, “Hey, we’re about to close this deal, but I need to discount our service.” People are going to start wanting to know well, what is the cheapest that you could sell your service for and still have a positive gross margin?Jesse: Yeah. So, if you’ve done a lot of the things that we’ve talked about in the last couple episodes—I apologize, I know homework’s not the best for a podcast—but if you’ve had the opportunity to work on some of those things, you should have a ton of valuable insights into your spend. We’re talking about tagging, and showback models in particular, maybe even a chargeback model. But you can ultimately use all of this data to better understand what is your forecasted spend is going to look like with a new potential customer coming onto the platform? Or if you get into the topic that we’re going to talk about today, which is mostly unit economics, you can really understand how much can I discount my service and still make a profit, like Pete mentioned?Pete: Yeah, I mean, imagine there’s a global pandemic that happens, and it causes your usage to spike by 500% within the course of a month. How did your spend change? Do you know where it changed? And did it change in ways that you were expecting it to? Like, my databases grew by a lot, and this other thing didn’t grow by very much.Like, that would be expected. But also another thing that—a question that we actually like to ask a lot of our clients, if your sales just doubled overnight, okay would your spend change? Where are the places that are most expensive to operate your service? And again, this is kind of generic. I’ve worked in a lot of SaaS services, so I always think of sales, but just think of whether you’re using the cloud for a SaaS service that you provide and sell, like, B2C, things like that, or B2B, you still have users.They might be internal users. Well, what if your users doubled overnight? What if half the company was using your internal service and now the whole company is? How does that change your usage?Jesse: And it’s also important to think about not just your AWS usage, but all of the other services that you use that support your overall business model: things like monitoring and observability tools, logging vendors, maybe third-party sim tools. All of these are affecting your overall total infrastructure cost and are all part of this conversation. So, it’s really important to start thinking about those architecture diagrams. Remember, when we said, way, way back at the beginning of this conversation, to overlay costs on top of your architecture diagram, understanding that, understanding what pa

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 5, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/Trash Taxi: https://trash.taxiTranscriptCorey: 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.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose. [laugh].Pete: Hashtag #FFF. Not my grades in high school; that is Fridays From the Field.Jesse: We will make it a thing. It’s going to happen.Pete: It’s going to happen. We’re going to do our best to use the hashtag triple-F as much as possible. So, if you have any questions for us, just again, reminder, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA as we talk more about our Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management. Please give us your feedback, ask us some questions, we’ll answer those in a future episode. Today, we’re expanding on tagging. Because it’s so thrilling to talk about tagging some more, Jesse.Jesse: We know that you have struggled to fall asleep at night listening to our podcasts. So, we wanted to do a very special episode just for you, to talk more about tagging. Let’s move into our NPR voices. [silky-smooth voice] Hello, and thank you for listening.Pete: [buttery-smooth voice] Sponsorship of this—no, I’m just kidding. We’re not—we leave that work to, Corey.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: So, today is really about how to win friends and influence DevOps, and it’s all about continual tagging improvement.Jesse: We talked about the importance of tagging, and one of the things that’s really important to tagging is identifying a tagging strategy, and then building and developing that tagging strategy over time. Your tagging strategy is going to change over time; that is the nature of the beast. Your organization is going to change over time, therefore your organization’s needs are going to change over time, and the tagging strategy and the tagging needs are going to change over time, as well.Pete: Exactly. You’re going to build new products; you’re going to grow, hopefully; you’re going to add additional Amazon accounts; you can make acquisitions; you could get sold to another business. There’s just so many things that are going to happen, they’re going to change. It’s just inevitable. So, how do you continue this process of tagging, and this is, I think, a really important discussion because when you start that process, you take that first step and you start investing in tagging, the best way to get those—you know, that compound interest on all of the return value that you’re putting into tagging, is by making it a long term, continual process. And I’m not talking about, like, “Well, you know, we do a little thing every month, and it’ll be good by, I don’t know, maybe a month or two, next quarter. And then we’ll be done.”Jesse: [laugh].Pete: And that doesn’t work. The best companies that we’ve seen that have really knocked this out of the park have turned this into just a multi-year endeavor. It is going to take you a long time to reach just, like, the pinnacle of tagging, having that ability to allocate just down to the penny of your Amazon spend is going to take a long time. So, manage those expectations appropriately that this is not an overnight fix.Jesse: So ultimately, at this point, you’ve tagged all of your resources; you’ve built this policy. The next thing to really think about is, why? Because in a lot of cases, a lot of engineers are going to ask you this very question. Why should we tag this information? Why should we tag these resources?And you’re going to need an answer that’s more than just, “Well, finance wants this information,” or, “Product wants this information,” or, “The engineering leadership team wants this information.” What you’re getting at with tagging is cost attribution. So, at a really high level, for those who aren’t familiar, cost attribution is the process of identifying, aggregating, and assigning your AWS spend to your organization’s teams, your business units, your products, however you want to slice-and-dice that data, whatever different tags you might be leveraging within your tagging policy. So, it’s really about where is your AWS spend going, along these different lines of the different things that finance cares about, that engineering cares about, that product cares about, that IT or security cares about. So, it’s not just about tagging your resources so that everything’s tagged, but it’s about leveraging that information to

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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 yo

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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

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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 th

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

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/AWS Tagging Best Practices Whitepaper: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/tagging-best-practices/welcome.htmlTranscriptCorey: 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: And we're back again, Jesse. We are back. But really have we gone anywhere to begin with?Jesse: We've been making our way slowly but surely through this Unconventional Guide. Lots of really interesting recommendations, lots of really interesting feedback from all of you, which we really, really appreciate. We can't wait to dive into some of those ideas deeper in future episodes.Pete: Yeah. And don't forget, you can give us additional feedback and questions at lastweekinaws.com/QA, feel free to add your name. Or not. Doesn't matter. It can be totally anonymous. That's fine with us. So today, we're talking about a topic that is very near and dear to our hearts. Jesse: Yes.Pete: It is tagging.Jesse: Yes.Pete: Tagging your resources in Amazon, or I mean really any cloud provider; any place you can tag something you probably should. And we're going to talk a little bit about strategies for that, how people use their tags, just all the fun things related to it. Tagging, it's easy to do, right, Jesse? You just tag your resources and all your problems go away.Jesse: Yep. Thanks, everybody, have a good night.Pete: So yeah, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to—no, I’m just kidding. Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Tagging is probably the thing that most companies are doing poorly, simply because it's hard, and it's an afterthought, and if you didn't have a really solid forced strategy to ensure tags and force compliance, you're probably not going back to fix it.Jesse: Yeah. It's not thought about as something that's a first-class citizen in the cloud world. When you think about the things that are important to your business model, you might think about getting your application out the door and running, maybe talking about business requirements for availability, failover, data retention, but tagging is nowhere on that list. That's not something that I think any organization thinks about as part of an MVP, let alone future iterations of their products.Pete: Tagging feels much like the same feeling I get when my doctor says that I should eat more veggies. Jesse: Oof.Pete: I know they're good for me; I know we need to do this. They have vitamins, and fiber, and all these wonderful things. But in order to make those veggies something I want to eat, we have to learn to make it more delicious. Personally, I find duck fat works to make them more delicious. I wish we could apply a duck fat strategy to the tagging problem.Jesse: Yeah, it's not an easy problem to solve. Or rather, I should say it is an easy problem to solve, but it's not something that anybody is quickly incentivized to solve. Tagging, just for the sake of tagging, it doesn't work.Pete: Yeah, it's that there really are no incentives for it. No good incentives. It's usually because someone came over to your desk and said, “Hey, what's this charge for? And who's using it? And what's the deal with this?” And you're going into Cost Explorer, and you're like, “Uh, I don't know. It's in this one account.” And that's as far as you can go to figure out who did what and why that thing is the way it is.Jesse: Yeah. There are so many different tagging strategies that we've seen. We've seen some clients talk about tagging as a way to potentially penalize engineers who aren't tagging or who are spending too much money. We've seen organizations who are tagging to reward teams that are tagging all their spend or keeping their spend optimized. Across the board, there are just so many different ways to go about this.Pete: So let's assume you are like most of the companies that we've seen. Definitely not all: there are some rare gems out there that are making tagging a long term and continual process, which we're actually going to talk about in a future episode, how to do that. But let's say you're just looking at your bill, you're looking at your usage, and you're saying to yourself, “Okay. I need to be better at this.” What do they say, “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step?” What is that first step?Jesse: Yeah th

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 1, 2021 with Corey Quinn.

Links:Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/Transcript Corey: 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 Fridays From the Field. I'm Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.Pete: And we're back, again. We're continuing our series, the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management. And as always, if you have questions, as we are going through this series and want to learn more, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. Thank you to all of those who have already submitted questions. Jesse: Yes.Pete: Really great ones coming in. Jesse: Thank you.Pete: We're going to take a couple of episodes in the future to answer those questions and really dive into them. So, keep them coming. We really love them so far. So Jesse, what are we talking about today?Jesse: Today, we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, which is that humans are the most expensive part of Cloud. Pete: Yeah, we hear this quite a bit. I mean, not just in salary, right? This is the line that usually is mentioned when we talk to folks about their Amazon spend. They say, “Well, outside of salary, Amazon is our most expensive bill.” Jesse: Yeah.Pete: That line has been repeated more times than I can count.Jesse: But what's so fascinating to me is that this really gets at the idea of total cost of ownership. I think that's ultimately what I really want to focus on for just a second. Total cost of ownership is thinking about all of the spend related to your cloud costs. Now, when you think about cloud costs, you will generally think about just the usage that you have within AWS, maybe some discounts from either an EDP or PPAs. But are you thinking about how much time it's taking your engineers to manage all of that usage, manage that infrastructure, manage the deployment pipelines that are living within the cloud? Are you thinking about all of those components and the cost of those components alongside your usage?Pete: Yeah, exactly. I think engineers are bad at this.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Myself included. But this is something where we want to build things. That's why we're in this industry. And it's fun to build things. Maybe not so much fun to, kind of, ongoing manage those things. Looking at you, Cassandra and Elasticsearch clusters.Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, it's this idea that there are definitely opportunities for engineers to spin things up and manage things on their own when you want to build that Kubernetes cluster and learn how to manage a Kubernetes cluster, learn how to build a Kubernetes cluster. That's great. We don't want to stop you from building and learning at all. But when you're building infrastructure for your organization, for your teams, for your products, is it going to be more cost-effective for you to build this solution yourself, or is it going to be more cost-effective for you to leverage existing managed services within the cloud?Pete: I like to call it operational FOMO, you know, the fear of missing out. And I think a lot of engineers suffer that when it comes to the new hotness, the new stuff. Kubernetes is a great example. I mean, I feel like a lot of those people were also equally like, “OpenStack is going to be the best thing ever.” And then it didn't. But I like to think of my time at a previous company where we deployed into the Cloud, specifically Amazon, and there was a fear that was, again, we've mentioned this before, it's an irrational fear about vendor lock-in. And that fear forced us into building forced us only using core primitives: S3, EC2, EBS, really. We really didn't use much more than that. I mean, obviously, the networks and stuff go in there. And the idea was, is that oh, well, we have this portability. And we—Duckbill Group, Corey, we've all talked about it, written about this. It's a fallacy. You're locked in for a lot of other reasons that I'm not going to go into right now. But because of that, we became very good at running our own databases and specifically consuming a large amount of time-series data. It was a security event

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 22, 2021. with 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’m Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.Pete: Fridays From the Field, Jesse. We're back again.Jesse: Back, back, back again.Pete: I always say that when I rage quit computers, it would be fun to be a farmer. And so maybe this is a little trial run “Fridays From the Field.” I'm just out in the field.Jesse: So basically, what I'm hearing is that you are the old man out in the field, yelling at the clouds as they go by.Pete: Well, now that I work from home pretty much all the time as part of Duckbill, but also due to COVID. I do yell at the squirrels who constantly tear up my yard. I've now turned into that person.Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, oh, Pete, I'm so sorry.Pete: Those squirrels. I hate them. So we're back again, talking about the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Savings. And this time, we're talking about ‘infrastructure code smell.’Jesse: Ooh, fun one.Pete: I like to equate this to, who brought the fish for lunch and microwave to that?Jesse: I always understood that at a deep core level, but didn't really think about it until I actually did microwave fish one day, and I regret everything.Pete: Don't do it. I'm telling you, folks, don't do it. You can bring tuna fish in. I guess that's fine. That's a little bit better. If it's packed in oil, it actually is a lot less smelly. Should we do a food podcast? No, I’m just kidding. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: So ‘code smell,’ I do want to bring this one up because I actually did a little bit of a TIL—today I learned—with code smell. Yeah, this term was actually coined by someone that was a writer about the agile software movement, Kent Beck. He was working with Martin Fowler, who's a noted author about programming. In the book called Refactoring, they coined this phrase ‘code smell.’Jesse: I did not know this.Pete: Yeah. You know, you kind of hear a term, you just accept it without really understanding why. But what it was called in this book was, code smell is a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem in the system. So obviously, it is what it sounds like: something smells. Something doesn't seem good here. And obviously, it can take a lot of forms. You most often hear it in, obviously, software engineering but, guess what? Software engineering has expanded to manage our infrastructure, right?Jesse: Mm-hm, absolutely. Yeah, it's not just about—or I should say, infrastructure smell is not just about wasted resources. It's really thinking about all of those one-off hacks that got you this far. So, that one time that you couldn't deploy something into production, so you just said, “You know what? I'm just going to log into the console and spin up that instance, and then call it a day, and close the change order, and be done with it so I don't have to worry about it. Maybe I'll open a ticket to see if I can figure out what happened in the deployment pipeline, but I'm not going to worry about it.” All those little things that you did along the way that aren’t probably the best practices that you ultimately should be following and ultimately want everybody else to be following. Pete: Yeah, and I'm looking at you, software infrastructure manager, who is still running an m1.medium in production. That's code smell. Jesse: Oof.Pete: Anyway. Just don't use the m1.mediums. Let them go away. But, Jesse, you're right. It's not just those hacks and one-offs. It's kind of back to the context. It's the how. How you're doing certain things with these Amazon resources, right?Jesse: Yeah. And I think that's something that's a really important caveat, the call out because there is always a balance between premature optimization and waste. I struggle with this one a lot. My brain automatically thinks, “Well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it the right way the first time, and I'm going to do it the streamlined automated way the first time so that I can just have it all set up the very first go, and set it and forget it and be done and walk away.” But in most cases, that's not how it works.Pete: Yeah, that is a complicated topic that I've struggled with as well. I've worked for predominantly unprofitable startups. We have a burn rate. We have only a certain amount of money in the bank and you di

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

Links:Unconventional GuideTranscriptCorey: 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. Hashtag Triple F.Jesse: It's going to be a thing.Pete: We're still trying to make it a thing. Desperately trying to make it a thing. Otherwise, we're just going to look like fools, Jesse, if it's not a thing.Jesse: Oh now, I wouldn't want to look like a fool, you know, next to anybody else in my company.Pete: [laugh]. It definitely seems to be the one that trait you need to have to work at Duckbill is, to be okay looking like a fool. So, we are midway through the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Optimizations, cost savings. And we have been sharing a link on pretty much if not all of these recordings where you can send us feedback. And you can send us questions. And someone finally sent us a question. I think people are listening out there, Jesse. Isn't that great? Jesse: We have one follower. Yay.Pete: It's amazing. So, we are really happy that someone asked us a question. You can be the next person to ask us a question by going into lastweekinaws.com/QA. That's not our quality assurance site for testing, new branding things, and new products. QA is for ‘question and answer.’ So, go there, check it out, drop in a message, you can put your name there or not, it's totally fine. But this first question—well, first, I need to actually, I need to admit something. I'm lying right now. This question actually came in months ago. We saw it and thought that was a great question, we should answer it at some point. And then we forgot about it. So we're bringing it back up again, and I think it's relevant so I don't feel too bad about it.Jesse: Yeah, we saw this question around the time that we started recording the entire Unconventional Guide series. And apologies to this listener. This is a very good question. We want to talk about it, so we are talking about it today. But it took a little bit of a time for us to get to this. Pete: But you know what? We made it. We're here.Jesse: We’re here.Pete: We're here. So, Nick Moore asked this great question. He said, “Hey, Pete and Jesse. Very much enjoying your Friday segment on the Morning Brief.” Thank you very much for that. “If possible, I'd like to hear you talk about your experiences with cost optimization for quote, ‘big data’ projects in the cloud, i.e. Using platforms like Hadoop to process large and complex data, either using pass—like, EMR or [IS 00:03:03]. Is this something that your customers ask about often/at all? And how do or would you approach it? Thanks, again.” Well, hey, this is a truly awesome question. And at a high level, many of our clients actually are pretty heavy users of various Amazon services for their, kind of, big data needs. And big data, it's all relative, right? I mean, to some companies, big data is in the hundreds of terabytes, to other companies it's in the hundreds of petabytes. It's totally relative, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a challenge, no matter how big of a company you are. Your big data challenges are always a challenge.Jesse: You've got some kind of data science or data analytics work that you want to do with large data sets. That may be large datasets comparatively to the work that you're doing; that may be large data sets comparatively to the industry. Doesn't matter. Either way, it is big data projects, and there are many, many, many, many solutions out there.Pete: What's interesting, too, is I think the reason that this has grown in prevalence over the last year, more of our clients have been using more of these services is simply because the barrier to entry on these projects, on these engagements, is so low. You can get started on Amazon with some Athena and Glue, maybe some EMR, for just an incredibly low cost. And also, from a technical standpoint, it's not that challenging. I mean, as a good example, most reasonably technical people could take their cost and usage report, get it integrated into Athena using AWS Glue in minutes. I mean, without using CloudFormation. I mean just clicking through to set it up. And honestly, for some clients, their cost and usage reports, and that's a big data problem. That could be—if you're not storing it in Parquet, if you're actually storing it in CSV because you're a mad person, those could be hundreds of gigabytes a day in volu

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