• Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Lol, is Netflix any of my customers who thought moving to public cloud services was a good idea?

    I would ask why customers are so dumb about how much public cloud offerings cost, but I know it’s a combination of 1) seemingly low prices up front, 2) bean counters that aren’t able to accurately cost forecast long term, and 3) a fundamental understanding of just how much compute they actually need. It’s absolutely stupid how many customers we have that are having to pull back on services because some genius thought moving to azure was a good financial move only to find out 6-8mo later that they’ve spent this year’s budget already.

  • naonintendois@programming.dev
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    24 hours ago

    The author has no clue how spending works in cloud environments nor why it’s so complicated to calculate. This is a pretty uniformed article.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      24 hours ago

      Yeah, everyone struggles with that, especially since AWS doesn’t really break down costs in a way that makes sense if you’re trying to work out which business unit or feature is costing you money (unless you set things up where every team has their own account or whatever, and even then).

      I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.

      • custard_swollower@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Not sure what is hard in it - you need consistent tagging, and that by itself gives you a lot of mileage in cost explorer.

        • BlueBockser@programming.dev
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          16 hours ago

          That doesn’t work in all cases. I’ve recently come across two examples where we had a hard time explaining our costs even though we extensively tag and even have fine-grained AWS accounts:

          • Some costs can’t be tagged or at least not easily, e.g. custom CloudWatch metrics.
          • For some resources it makes a lot more sense to provide them centrally for multiple services at once, e.g. NAT gateways or load balancers.
        • c0c0c0@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          Not only is that free, but I can’t imagine a better alternative. And they would have the same issue with allocation on prem. WithOUT tagging and Cost Explorer.

        • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          Yeah, the actual headline to the article is “Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate,” which OP has very unhelpfully shortened to post “Netflix struggles to understand its cloud costs.”

          The word “Even” is doing a lot of work, and leaving it out changes the meaning of the headline.

            • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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              17 hours ago

              Of course. But even for people who don’t read the article, it’s still best practice to just copy the headline from the article so that it’s the top of the Lemmy thread.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        I think Netflix could probably start selling their tool and make more money from that then streaming if they can get it to work, because I’m guessing AWS makes it hard on purpose.

        The company Cloudhealth Technologies has already been doing this for years, and not just with AWS but other cloud providers as well. Unfortunately they’ve been acquired by VMware so no idea if they’re still as good as they used to be…

      • theherk@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        This just isn’t true. AWS is very clear about pricing and provides pretty good tooling for analysis. Complex infrastructure will have complex costs though. AWS has its problems a’plenty, but unclear costs isn’t one in my opinion.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          I agree, works fine for my stuff, but I’m pretty heavy on vanilla ec2, RDS, ec.

          I can see some people running some of the more complicated products and getting flustered. Some of the compound stuff where you’re paying extra transaction costs on top of the serverless things

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          7 hours ago

          So Netflix built this tool just for fun then? Obviously they feel AWS’ tools are lacking.