Re:We use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billin...
by vidarh on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @07:21AM
(#22412555)
I used to do that, and used to actively recommend customers not to use AWS in most cases, or to use hybrid setups, as while my billable hours tended to be higher for AWS setups, the demand is high enough that it's not worth making bad recommendations to milk a client vs. showing them that you can help them secure substantial savings.
Some setups we made cloud agnostic enough that when we finally got migrations approved we were able to do zero downtime migrations by splitting the setup between providers temporarily. That incidentally was the best way of getting people to migrate: You make the case for resilience and flexibility, then argue for a test run for a month or so, and then all it takes is for them to compare the bills.
I even several times made offers to migrate customers off AWS for a proportion of what I estimated they'd save over the next 3-6 months. None of them ever took me up on it when they realized just how much that'd add up to vs. the fixed time based offer I gave them but it was a useful sales tool to demonstrate that I was willing to stand behind my estimates. One customer slashed their hosting bill 90% by getting off AWS (they were bandwidth heavy, and we cut their bandwidth costs by 98%; AWS outbound transfer is ridiculous)..
[as I've said elsewhere, AWS has its uses, but keeping cost down is not one of them... Ironically one of the good uses for AWS is to keep the cost of a dedicated setup down: Being able to "spill" over onto AWS (or other cloud) instances in the case of unexpected events lets you operate far closer to the wire than you otherwise would dare on a dedicated environment, even if you rarely use the capability; doing so also allows for more easily spinning up additional test/dev environments etc]
The biggest reason I can see why you don't find more consultants offering those services, is that a surprising proportion of people hire consultants to give them backing to do what they already want done ("see, the AWS consultant says I was right to want to use this AWS service") rather than to genuinely give independent advice. If you're not comfortable being repeatedly told "yes, but here's why we'll be ignoring the professional advice we ostensibly hired you for" and being very careful about forcefully presenting opinions backed by evidence that don't match the hiring managers preconceptions, the pool of contracts rapidly shrinks.
Some setups we made cloud agnostic enough that when we finally got migrations approved we were able to do zero downtime migrations by splitting the setup between providers temporarily. That incidentally was the best way of getting people to migrate: You make the case for resilience and flexibility, then argue for a test run for a month or so, and then all it takes is for them to compare the bills.
I even several times made offers to migrate customers off AWS for a proportion of what I estimated they'd save over the next 3-6 months. None of them ever took me up on it when they realized just how much that'd add up to vs. the fixed time based offer I gave them but it was a useful sales tool to demonstrate that I was willing to stand behind my estimates. One customer slashed their hosting bill 90% by getting off AWS (they were bandwidth heavy, and we cut their bandwidth costs by 98%; AWS outbound transfer is ridiculous)..
[as I've said elsewhere, AWS has its uses, but keeping cost down is not one of them... Ironically one of the good uses for AWS is to keep the cost of a dedicated setup down: Being able to "spill" over onto AWS (or other cloud) instances in the case of unexpected events lets you operate far closer to the wire than you otherwise would dare on a dedicated environment, even if you rarely use the capability; doing so also allows for more easily spinning up additional test/dev environments etc]
The biggest reason I can see why you don't find more consultants offering those services, is that a surprising proportion of people hire consultants to give them backing to do what they already want done ("see, the AWS consultant says I was right to want to use this AWS service") rather than to genuinely give independent advice. If you're not comfortable being repeatedly told "yes, but here's why we'll be ignoring the professional advice we ostensibly hired you for" and being very careful about forcefully presenting opinions backed by evidence that don't match the hiring managers preconceptions, the pool of contracts rapidly shrinks.