But usually it's also about visibility. Services like CloudHealth give you much better billing overview than what AWS gives you. Without that data you may have a lot of blind spots and budget management is much harder. I think the long term value is billing visibility even for companies with good AWS experts.
I think the math behind saving algorithms isn't too complicated. It's just hard to get it around your head specially when you have too many resources. So it's not practical to do it without these tools.
You will be surprised how much inefficiency developers can produce. Especially with infrastructure as code it's just too easy to create oversized resources and forget about them.
Many companies also have a lot of inefficiency with their architecture. So it makes sense to outsource savings on EC2 instances to a service like this and let your internal talents to focus on architecture optimizations where you can probably even save more money.
Every recommendation is first produced by a model. Then for a recommendation, we add a human to the cycle that understands the client's infrastructure and adjusts the confidence score accordingly. The savings are then shown on a user's dashboard - alongside an analysis report.
When we onboard a new customer, we spend time understanding their infrastructure plans. Then we keep that information for our human-in-the-loop.
> why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model
This is something I am curious about as well.
1. Annual recommendations (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) Sure, if a company only wants these recommendations - they can bring on a contractor once per year to do these changes. This is the one-off fee type contractor the poster is talking about
2. Continuous recommendations (Rightsizing, Spot Management) These recommendations are typically not something you could do once and be done. Rightsizing (which includes zombie instance detection) can happen through time. Spot Fleet management is also a continuous play - spot prices fluctuate and Usage's strategy works hard to maximize savings while minimizing downtime.
You might ask, how does this compare to hiring a contractor full time?
If you're a midsized company, Usage charges $5k/month (or $60k/year). A fulltime contractor in SV would likely be at least $100k/year and that doesn't factor in the number of billable hours (through interviewing) it would take to find someone who knows 50%+ of all of AWS' features.
Additionally, our growth and enterprise plans all have guaranteed savings. 3x and 5x, respectively.
For instance, if you chose the growth plan ($5k/month) and saved less than $180k after 12 months, we'd give you a 100% refund.
Similarly, if you chose the enterprise plan ($10k/month) and saved less than $600k after 12 months, we'd give you a 100% refund.
Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised.
> optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms
> ...then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each recommendation for correctness
So how much of the heavy lifting is actually done by the algorithms?