[StratusBen]

That's definitely not our ambition with launching this feature. That being said, we do consistently hear that cloud consultants tend to be inaccessible and/or prohibitively expensive especially for startups/SMBs.

As developers are becoming more financially savvy as it relates to cloud infrastructure our goal is to simply give them the suite of analytics tools to dive deeper themselves. This feature launch supports that aim.

[atonse]

I have never done cost consulting but if I were to, I’d use this tool to do the grunt work and then use my brain to advise clients on how to actually cut costs. Like, rearchitect this piece based on that etc.

So my guess is that this would weed out cost consultants that are just glorified report writers, in exchange for ones that can actually give you actionable customized advice, rather than the canned type.

[StratusBen]

Exactly. You nailed it.

It's similar to a Github repo in some respects. Developers will connect their AWS account, invite their teams and temporarily add folks like cloud consultants to their Vantage team to provision some reports or do some initial investigation. We're thinking through some more collaboration features in the future to support this more.

[atonse]

I'd love to use this today. Will try it out.

We are a small team and have a hard time monitoring costs. The AWS billing alerts (which I setup after realizing too late that our ES cluster was costing us more than the rest of our infra) are rudimentary but need a bit more intelligence about exactly where our stuff is underutilized.

AWS has tools for _all_ these things (and can even show you underutilized or oversized resources) but they are quite half baked. I think this is intentional because they don't want to make it brain dead simple for you to cut costs.