
How YipitData slashed $2.5M, or 50%, off our AWS bill - jmaccabee
https://medium.com/yipitdata-engineering/how-yipitdata-slashed-over-2-5-million-off-of-our-aws-bill-43ca1125e03b
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jmaccabee
We're also happy to try and answer any questions the HN community has on how
we did this or why it worked for us

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sherlock_h
Did the switch to Ohio change anything with regard to performance?

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jmaccabee
We took an initial performance hit as a result of not moving everything to
Ohio at once. We moved our EC2 machines first but then saw increased latency
between other services like ECR (where we store our Docker images) and Kinesis
Firehose that were still in Virginia, so ultimately we moved those too.

So it wasn't so much that Ohio has worse performance, but that talking to
services across region does.

One note on Firehose specifically for the curious - we make requests to
Firehose in Ohio, and then Firehose sends the data to S3 back in Virginia
(which we didn't want to move). Normally sending data across regions is
expensive, but Firehose actually absorbs the cost in sending the streams to
S3. We're honestly not quite sure why, but it worked out great for our costs!

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tlevy9
Was there any response from AWS after this?

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jmaccabee
Yeah, we found AWS to be helpful throughout the cost optimization process. If
you think about it, AWS probably also benefits from happier customers with
more sustainable bills since it makes them less likely to look for more cost
effective alternatives. It's better for both sides from a long-term
perspective

