/AWS

How An Empty S3 Bucket Can Make Your AWS Bill Explode

- Maciej Poćwierz tl;dr: “I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free-tier limits. Apparently, it wasn’t. My bill was over $1,300, with the billing console showing nearly 100,000,000 S3 PUT requests executed within just one day!”

featured in #511

Slashing Data Transfer Costs In AWS By 99%

- Daniel Kleinstein tl;dr: “AWS replicates S3 data between availability zones for you - whatever this might cost AWS is hidden away in the storage costs you pay for your data. So at its most fundamental level, this method is unlocking free cross-AZ costs - because you’ve effectively already paid for the cross-AZ cost when you uploaded your data to S3! Indeed, if you were to leave your data stored in S3, you’d end up paying significantly more than the cross-AZ cost - but by deleting it immediately after transferring it, you unlock the 99% savings we were going for.”

featured in #481

The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

- Corey Quinn tl;dr: Speculative cost analysis of Amazon Prime Day 2023's AWS bill. The author calculates the on-demand cost at retail pricing for various AWS services used during the 48-hour event. The total estimated cost comes to $102,424,943.84. Even though this figure is likely much higher than the actual cost, considering the volume discounts and internal adjustments, the estimated infrastructure spend is a small fraction compared to the $12.7 billion in sales generated during Prime Day, highlighting the efficiency and return on investment of AWS services.

featured in #440

How Canva Saves Millions Annually In Amazon S3 Costs

tl;dr: Canva saved millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by migrating their infrequently accessed user-generated data to the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class. This storage class offered low-cost archival storage with fast retrieval times. By understanding their data and usage patterns and strategically transitioning data, Canva achieved a positive return on investment within a few months, resulting in significant cost savings of approximately $3.6 million per year.

featured in #425

S3 Isn't Getting Cheaper

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: "AWS S3 pricing hasn't decreased as fast as the underlying storage costs. This doesn't include the additional fees like egress. Of course, prices vary by storage tier and region, but this seems to be a general trend." Matt graphs the changes in pricing over time. 

featured in #359

Penny Wise And Cloud Foolish

tl;dr: The two iron rules of cloud pricing introduced by AWS are: (1) Prices never go up. (2) We will "absolutely soak you on data transfer charges", and last week Google Cloud published a recent post explaining how they were adopting the second rule and ignoring the first.

featured in #301

Behind The Scenes, AWS Lambda

- Bruno Schaatsbergen tl;dr: "Lambda is split into a control plane and data plane. Each plane is responsible for a specific set of activities in the service. The Control Plane provides management APIs and manages integrations with all AWS services. Whilst the Data Plane is Lambda's Invoke API that triggers Lambda function invocations, this explanation is still very abstract but things will become clearer over time." Bruno details the underlying mechanics of AWS Lamda. 

featured in #271

Doubling Down On Open, Part II

- Shay Banon tl;dr: Elastic will move the "code of Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under SSPL and the Elastic License, giving users the choice of which license to apply."

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Why AWS Loves Rust, And How We’d Like To Help

- Matt Asay tl;dr: "We’re committing to further strengthen a community that has greatly benefited us and our customers." As well as the community, AWS investments include "developer tools, infrastructure components, interoperability, and verification.”

featured in #217

Making Time to Change, Part 1

- Phil Le-Brun tl;dr: The author dispels the myth that "employees simply don’t have the time to take on more work" citing organizational issues of ownership, opacity of issues, lack of emotional engagement. Phil runs through Muda, a "catch-all term for non-value-added activities."

featured in #192