toeknee123

Yoooo. Appreciate the shout-out! I am one of the co-founders and CEO of https://www.cloudforecast.io/

We're a (mostly)bootstrap company, so it's always awesome to hear the "word of mouth" mention of my company. It means we're doing something right :).

Feel free to let me know if I can help in any way or answer any questions anyone might have!

Implementing a simple and effective tagging strategy for visibility and monitoring is one of the most important aspect of cloud cost control. From our experience, this is where most of our own users start.

Knowing the "why's" and "where" will help everyone within the org (eng and finance) make better decisions on what and where to focus on (https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/aws-tagging-best-practices...). Also, it'll make AWS Cost Explorer or any other cost managements tools WAY more effective.

Cost optimization can feel like drinking from a firehouse since there are so many different strategies, and approaches to it (autoscaling, spot, reserved instances/savings plans, eliminating idle & wasted resources, etc.). Also, you have to apply your OWN organizational context to it as well (business and tech side). There is a fine balance companies and eng dept need to take with cloud cost control since it can be a huge time commitment to pull your end dept into.

(disclaimer // founder of https://www.cloudforecast.io)

Appreciate the shout out and your assessment is pretty spot on w/ #1 (I am one of the co-founders of CloudForecast).

We're actually huge fans of Infracost and what they've done so far. They've built an amazing tool for eng teams, who should always be the lead when it comes to managing cloud cost. We actually have a few customers using them along side us as well.

Congrats on launch, Ali, Hassan and Alistair!

Congrats, Kevin and Pierre on the success. You've all been such an inspiration and model for us in the TinySeed community.

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know.

We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices.

(I'm a co-founder of CloudForecast)

CloudForecast(www.cloudforecast.io) is super excited to be part of this years TinySeed batch. Couldn't have asked for a better fit in terms of mentors, program and fellow companies.

It's great (and funny) to see how far our journey has come since we first launched on HackerNews almost 4 years ago [1]. This "launch" was a spring board for us to who we are today.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551796

100% agree. We're big fans of CloudCustodian and use it ourselves. However, it can be tough for some org to get approval with using open source tools.

100% agree. We've seen some crazy typos and other things while helping our customers clean up their tagging. We're developing Part 2 guide right now, which will cover Terraform and CloudFormation.

Those are really practical and interesting use cases for tags that we should definitely cover more of. Let me note this and we'll be sure to cover more in-depth uses as we develop more parts to this guide! Appreciate the feedback.

I hear ya on that! We've found that a lot of orgs just want to go straight into "how do we save money?" However, without having that visibility through tags and organizing your cost with tags....where do you even start.

Tony here, one of the co-founders of CloudForecast (www.cloudforecast.io)!

We just released a new feature to our daily cost reports that helps you keep track of your AWS Reserved Instances. The new feature helps ensure your Reserved Instances purchases are not going to waste by actively monitoring utilization and expiration across a few major AWS products: EC2, ElastiCache, RedShift and RDS.

Would love to hear your feedback and ways we can make this better!