/Cloud

Struggling with Snowflake Costs? Try our Cost Optimization Calculator

tl;dr: Snowflake costs skyrocket for SaaS providers because the need to deliver real-time, interactive analytics is always on. If your Snowflake bill is spiraling, try our cost optimization calculator to discover your potential savings when using a Snowflake warehouse for ad-hoc queries. (No form required)

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How Discord Moved Engineering To Cloud Development Environments

- Denbeigh Stevens tl;dr: “The Internal Developer Experience team is responsible for roughly the first third of the development life cycle. Our main tasks include building and maintaining IDE experiences, managing development environments, shipping tools for building, developing, and testing code, scaling and maintaining CI infrastructure, and owning the change management process and supporting tooling infrastructure. While we could delve deeper into any of these topics, this blog post focuses on how we transitioned all backend and infrastructure development to a Linux-based Cloud Development Environment.”

featured in #492


The Rise And Fall Of Spot Instance Pricing In 2023

- Phil Andrews tl;dr: Dive into our latest deep-dive on spot instance pricing trends over the past year. Azure's prices skyrocketed by 108%, while GCP surprised everyone with a 26% drop. AWS? Somewhere in between. Discover the regions and instance types that saw the most dramatic shifts and learn how our game-changing "scheduled rebalancing" tool can save you big bucks in this ever-evolving cloud pricing arena. Don't miss out on these crucial insights – perfect for refining your cloud strategy.

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People Love Snowflake, But…

tl;dr: Delivering sub-second analytics over large datasets can get pricey. When it comes to optimizing performance and cost, there are many great players. See how Snowflake compares to Firebolt, Clickhouse, Databricks, and more in the [2023 Cloud Data Warehouse Comparison Guide](https://hi.firebolt.io/lp/cloud-data-warehouse-comparison?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=pointer&utm_campaign=comparison).

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2023 Cloud Data Warehouse Comparison Guide

tl;dr: 2023 Cloud Data Warehouse Comparison Guide

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You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Streaming Data Performance To Cut Cloud Costs

tl;dr: Redpanda is faster and more efficient than Apache Kafka… but how much faster exactly? We ran 200+ hours of benchmarks to find out how both platforms perform for various workloads and hardware configurations. Here’s our breakdown on how Redpanda achieves 10x the performance while cutting cloud spend by over $500k.

featured in #407


You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Streaming Data Performance To Cut Cloud Costs

tl;dr: Redpanda is faster and more efficient than Apache Kafka… but how much faster exactly? We ran 200+ hours of benchmarks to find out how both platforms perform for various workloads and hardware configurations. Here’s our breakdown on how Redpanda achieves 10x the performance while cutting cloud spend by over $500k.

featured in #405


Inside Uber’s Move To The Cloud: Part 1

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely covers: (1) The history of Uber’s data centers. (2) Challenges of operating your own data centers - hard drives, ODM woes, and the automation of data center maintenance. (3) Incentives and pull factors from Covid-19, the Postmates acquisition, and CapEx and OpEx costs. (4) Cloud basics. A primer on data centers, regions, and availability zones. What these mean for public Cloud providers and businesses like Uber.

featured in #396


We Stand To Save $7m Over Five Years From Our Cloud Exit

- David Heinemeier Hansson tl;dr: “The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That's the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we'll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.”

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Our Cloud Spend In 2022

- Fernando Álvarez tl;dr: "Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we’ve entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement. This is a highly-optimized budget.""This post will cover why I went through the effort of creating a Python SQL engine and how a simple query goes from a string to actually transforming data." Toby covers tokenizing, parsing, optimizing, planning and executing.

featured in #381