

Reduce AWS costs by scheduling machine uptime - thecarlhall
http://cldy.co/1vxXHCD

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valarauca1
I have to ask 64% of what?

I just ask because even a large AWS instance is relatively cheap. And saying,
"We saved 64% in margin X" sounds great on paper. I'm forced to look at the
big picture. How long did developing the solution to turn on/off the instance
cost? Sure maybe a day, 8 hours, $800 dollars of labor at a base estimate,
maybe less. How much time was spent in generating this report? Was this report
generated before and this cost missed (how many times was it missed)? Whats
the ROI on this solution?

These are the question a manager should ask. And I understand if you can't
divulge them across the internet.

:.:.:

I ask because AWS is cheap, and sure saving $50-100 a month sounds good. Put
better toilet paper in the restroom, or buy bagels Friday morning.

But if you are investing >$800 in developer time to engineer a 8-10 month ROI
solution, wouldn't just buying a box to set in the corner and calling it, "The
building/staging" box result in exactly the same savings? Without surrendering
up time?

~~~
thecarlhall
64% is the savings when comparing the cost of running the instances before and
after scheduling. This directly correlates to the hours we dictated the
machine to run (instances "on" about 36% of the time). This is also a very
rudimentary example without dynamic scaling.

So getting down to comparative costs, I wrote the script in about 90 mins
while watching a TV program. Coming up with the numbers to compare before and
after was 10 minutes at most. While neither of these incurred no loss of
regular schedule time during the day (done at home on my time), you could
account my hours at home by my some hourly rate. Even at very generous
consulting rates, the ROI for these 100 minutes was easily realized in the
first week that the script was in place.

We were able to save $183 _per week_ with this solution and that only touched
6 of our instances. We still have 1-2 orders of magnitude of instances to
apply this to. This was identified as a quick and easy change and had the ROI
been something months ahead, we would've addressed the issue in myriad other
ways. These machines were already provably not being used during specific
hours of the day, so uptime wasn't so much surrendered as the instances are
set to be running when needed stopped when unused.

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thecarlhall
Here's a link to the script that we use.

[https://github.com/cloudability/valet](https://github.com/cloudability/valet)

