[brodouevencode]

OpenSearch is notoriously expensive. I'll go further: any managed service at AWS is notoriously expensive.

NAT Gateway? Expensive.

Elasticache? Expensive.

Sagemaker suite? Expensive.

The list goes on. You're paying for a butt to be in a seat. I'd also like to see a breakdown of where they are spending money in S3. I've worked at places where the bill was $4m per month, so sometimes it amuses me when people complain about their (much) lower bills.

[toomuchtodo]

You’re paying either way, managed or your own engineering time. Pick which line item you want the spend on.

Could you roll your own ES clusters, Redis clusters, or object storage systems? Certainly. Is that the best use of your engineering capacity vs revenue generating work? That’s the math you’ve got to work out, and the role of your engineering management. If you’re a steady state business, then it probably makes sense to start performing aggressive cost optimization. If you’re a rocket ship, spend a bit more and optimize to grow the top line as fast as you can; you can optimize costs later.

With all that said, I’d agree AWS egress bandwidth is extortionate.

[brodouevencode]

True, but we had found ways around that premium and still get the same service levels (basically by having dedicated teams to shared resources). Yeah my job was cost optimization type work - we had a few folks on my team dedicated to this.