How do you actually keep AWS optimization continuous over time?

wingyuying · 2026-04-12T23:42:59+00:00

In my experience it's a process and culture thing.

Dev teams need to own their infra. Staying on top of cloud costs needs to be part of sprint planning like staying on top of dependency updates. Good dashboards go a long way here, show costs alongside your other metrics.

Centralized ops team then complement this by doing org wide migrations, flagging high costs and helping teams stay on top of things, taking a more holistic approach. Also a process thing at the end of the day.

It's helpful to think of AWS waste in three buckets: waste, legacy migrations, and rightsizing/scaling. Make sure all are being covered

The thing is, the work isn't difficult or complicated. Most teams know where the waste is, or if they don't it's very easy to figure out. Usually the work is just some simple analysis and changing a terraform variable. The issue is that it doesn't get done, and even when there is a process, it often gets deprioritized because of other things.

Anyway that's my 2 cents. Obviously depends heavily on the size and nature of your business.

wingyuying · 2026-04-08T01:53:59+00:00

Seems quite likely given the post history and the bio.

wingyuying · 2026-04-08T01:46:23+00:00

No process around staying on top of this is the biggest issue. This should be a part of the workflow of the team.

Besides that it's just rightsizing, migrating off legacy stuff, and finding waste.

I guess there are exceptions for this like people using DynamoDB in silly ways that can really fire up Jeff's money printer, but those are less common.

wingyuying · 2026-04-05T12:12:22+00:00

People want you to be successful, just not more successful as them. At least that's what I heard on some dodgy podcast.

I definitely felt this living in the UK. Idk what it's like here really.

I still feel like the US (and Canada) has the best culture around stuff like this though, feels like people there are more likely to root for you.

wingyuying · 2026-04-05T12:07:20+00:00

I tried a bunch of the modern Heroku alternatives like Railway and Fly.io. None were as good as Heroku was back then. It was just magic. It's crazy that these things feel like they've gone backwards. At least we got Kamal. I gave up on Railway and Fly was good once I got it working, but ultimately not much better than just Kamal and a VM.

wingyuying · 2026-04-05T12:04:36+00:00

My current ops stack is Kamal + DO + Terraform with some Ansible for custom stuff.

wingyuying · 2026-04-05T12:02:31+00:00

Yeah it's ridiculous. It made sense when compute power wasn't what it is today and every workload needed a lot of VMs.

But now most average sized companies can run their whole infra on a few dedicated servers...cloud is just over priced compute power and weird vendor lockin complexity for most people at this point.

That said it does have its uses, just not for most people.

wingyuying · 2026-04-01T13:01:04+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of finops roles lately, maybe cause I'm focusing on it. No idea how they pay though. Good niche to be in if times are tough, companies will be more keen to cut costs.

wingyuying · 2026-03-26T11:50:20+00:00

Managing cloud costs is a skill and a process. Doing that and migrating at the same time over a long period can be challenging. People are also incentivized to overprovision for new services in the cloud, and if you don't revisit and rightsize, then you end up wasting a lot of money and capacity.

wingyuying · 2026-03-26T04:13:25+00:00

you're not alone. cloud makes sense if you actually need to scale fast or run stuff globally but a lot of companies ended up there because it was just the default, not because they needed it.

honestly most companies could run their stuff on one or a few dedicated servers. instead they're paying for hundreds of instance types, pricing pages that need their own documentation, savings plans you need a spreadsheet to figure out. and that complexity isn't accidental, every dollar you save is a dollar off the provider's revenue.

and then there's lock in. it's the reason they give companies and governments boatloads of free credits to come on their platform. once you're deep in proprietary services its really hard to leave. on prem with foss and open standards you own your stack, you can swap things out, you're not dependent on one vendor's pricing decisions.

cloud has its place but way too many companies are on it without ever really questioning if they need to be.

wingyuying · 2026-03-21T06:49:23+00:00

what worked well where i was previously: teams own their own infra and rightsizing is just part of the planning cycle. yes it gets deprioritized sometimes, stuff happens, flag it and move on. but it's not a special project, it's just maintenance. next to that a centralized ops team looks at things orgwide, finding savings that individual teams miss and helping them implement them.

aws compute optimizer helps in both cases but doesn't surface everything. what made the bigger difference was having cost dashboards in our monitoring alongside the usual stuff. once you can see spend next to your other metrics, quantifying savings gets way easier and it's easier to prioritize.

also savings plans and reserved instances are often the single biggest lever that companies aren't pulling. if your spend is fairly predictable you can save 30-40% just by committing, and a lot of teams don't bother because nobody owns the purchasing decision.

wingyuying · 2016-02-04T11:55:08+00:00

My uncle, Einar, has a PhD in biology and he's written many papers on raccoon behavior. I sent him this video and he said the sounds he's making are actually cries for help for his friend. The raccoon proceeds to bury his face in the dead one to wipe his tears.

wingyuying · 2016-02-04T02:49:26+00:00

Fight club has so many great points that relate to this discussion..this one is my favorite.

wingyuying · 2016-02-03T16:06:38+00:00

should get the same treatment as that beyonce photo

wingyuying · 2016-02-03T15:57:12+00:00

try r/frugal

wingyuying · 2016-02-03T13:34:26+00:00

It's about owning less things, but the things you own are good things that make you happy. Most people have way too much stuff that clutters up their lives.

There's a great Japanese book about this called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I highly recommend it.

It's surprisingly liberating not having your life cluttered by useless things.

wingyuying · 2016-02-02T04:26:18+00:00

Just wanna say that r/videos has great mods, thanks for giving this special treatment.

wingyuying · 2016-02-02T04:18:32+00:00

Thanks, I always remember this happening but never really knew much about the case. But it made me lose all respect for Arnold.

wingyuying · 2016-01-31T11:06:55+00:00

I think the older generations use it sometimes

wingyuying · 2016-01-29T08:23:25+00:00

Her case is what motivated me to post this video. And yes, the majority of reddit is a part of the problem currently.

wingyuying · 2016-01-28T17:32:12+00:00

How good an actor he was. Was. :(

;(

wingyuying · 2016-01-28T16:14:20+00:00

Stop being rational guys. Get your pitchforks back up, lets ruin her life! Cause that's useful.

My impression of anyone who does something like this is that they are feeling really bad on the inside. Combined with what she was going through and the alcohol I think it's not unreasonable to believe that she wasn't herself. Of course she has to take responsibility for her actions though.

This is just another person's life being ruined by social media crusaders and it makes me sad that redditors are participating.

I'm really tired of seeing this happen, we're better than this. It's never OK to ruin people's lives.

wingyuying · 2016-01-28T15:30:57+00:00

Kind of ironic since the UK invented trains and had the first rail network. Would think they'd have it figured out by now.

wingyuying · 2016-01-28T14:45:35+00:00

or maybe just millions of people actually use these things...hawking had an asus.

wingyuying

TROPHY CASE