Ask HN: How do you manage cloud costs?

[edcr]

In large teams it is pretty easy to end up with things like unused vm's, files stored and forgotten about in s3/blobs etc, machines left running over weekends etc when not in use.

How do people make sure they aren't wasting money like this or don't they?

Thanks!

[mattbgates]

I use DreamCompute, which is DreamHost's OpenStack cloud computing. The smallest instance cost just $4.50 a month at 512 MB and $6.00 for 1 GB. Each instance comes with 80 GB SSD + 100 GB block and bandwidth is currently unmetered, though DreamHost has stated they will likely be charging in the future. I can't imagine they would charge a fortune for it and would likely keep it very competitive. Having scoured the Internet for a better cloud system than that and better rates, I haven't seen anything that beats it.

I currently have a fair-amount-of-traffic website sitting on the 1 GB server, while I have several web apps, which aren't getting traffic at the moment, sitting on a smaller single server.

I don't have teams, but it is pretty easy to know what instances I spin up and which ones I'm using. Regardless of whether the server is being used or not, you still get charged. So to not get charged, I only use what I need.

I remember using AWS once, really just for testing, and somehow wracked up a bill for $90 or something like that, despite not getting much traffic. I think I set up a portfolio website, WordPress with like 6 pages, and forgot about it. I doubt it was getting a lot of traffic. Luckily, Amazon actually refunded me. So sometimes pay-for-usage is not always the best way to do things.

But as far as uptime for DreamCompute, so far, other than figuring out how much I had needed in the beginning.. because I had originally set my 1 GB server to 512 MB, the website kept crashing. Once I figured out I needed more RAM and put caching in place, the uptime has been 100%.

[edcr]

Cheers Matt - it is more how do I make sure we aren't spending money on things we don't need - we have lots of developers and whenever I go through everything manually I end up seeing things that aren't being used.

[QuinnyPig]

It's harder than it looks. Solving this problem is my entire business model.

Stopping unused resources is half of it-- the overlooked other half is understanding what the bill shows you. Finance doesn't care about how much is compute vs storage, they care about COGS vs R&D spend.

One-off cost reductions are relatively easy; coming up with a longer term approach takes significantly more work.

[edcr]

Cool I'm thinking of doing something for azure but not sure if anyone cares (anyone seriously using azure gets lots of free credits) :)