[steve_adams_86]

A couple of my coworkers think I’m nuts for watching cost explorer so closely but

1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more

2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht

[jarrettcoggin]

I've personally noticed and saved multiple $xx,xxx monthly cost billing spikes just by take a daily glance at our cost explorer. I'm in the AWS accounts every day doing investigative work anyway that an extra 30-60 seconds is trivial.

Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.

[inigyou]

> 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht

Then you aren't using AWS. At least half of all the money you give to Amazon is yacht money.

[steve_adams_86]

Unfortunately not a choice at my organization

[robocat]

> yacht money

Huh? Apparently Amazon has never paid dividends, has done much less than 1% buybacks, even as CEO Bezos was getting less than an engineer in total comp (but did get loans or something).

Apparently Bezos owns about 9% of common stock - no dual class shite.

So your yacht spending sounds like a hallucination: if I'm missing something, please correct me.

Amazon's weight: about 3.7–3.8% of the S&P 500. So he isn't even that overweighted (especially as the market doesn't like owners selling down - bad optics).

Bezos has spent about 28 billion for Blue Origin by selling Amazon stock - not using shell games. He has comparitively spent a few percent of that amount on superyachts.

[naiveter]

Do you just watch for trends? Curious to know your process to verify if the cost is right or wrong.