Recent content in AutoSpotting - Save 60-90% on AWS EC2 Costs on AutoSpotting
In case you haven’t noticed, Vantage recently updated ec2instances.info with a new refreshed look and feel. Over the weekend I had a deep-dive into their changes and thought about what to do with the cloud-instances.info fork I launched just a few weeks ago. Why I forked it in the first place? I covered this in more depth in my initial post, but basically when I decided to fork it, their…
It’s been a little more than a week since I decided to fork ec2instances.info as cloud-instances.info , which I announced publicly last Thursday. While in my previous post I mostly focused on the context around this fork and how I got to it, on this post I want to talk a bit about what happened after after I decided to fork the project over the last few days and where we’re at right…
Most people using AWS for enough time end up using the ec2instances.info website (a.k.a. instances.vantage.sh) to conveniently compare EC2 instance types across families based on specs and pricing. It’s basically an online spreadsheet with a lot of data about all cloud instance types and filters to slice and dice that data, as you can see below: The ec2instances.info Open Source project Few…
Announcing a new release to the LeanerCloud ONCE bundle, which consists of the Terraform serverless microservice building blocks. The bundle also contains the Optimizer CLI FinOps tool for GP2 to GP3 conversion for EC2 and EDS, and rightsizing with conversion to Graviton for RDS, Elasticache and OpenSearch, released previously. These Terraform building blocks are a set of example Terraform modules…
June 01, 2024 This is an expanded version of a LinkedIn post I wrote the other day. The first email I read this week was this one I received from a billionaire friend, who wanted to talk to me on very short notice: He’s the founder and CEO of a pretty large and well known company he still largely owns, and I respect him a lot so I won’t reveal his identity.
I decided to release all the CLI tools and Terraform building blocks I use in my customers engagements under the 37signals ONCE Model , and under their ONCE source-available license . What’s included? For now this release only includes Optimizer, my flagship CLI tool for automated optimization of AWS resources which I use all the time in my service engagements to save my customers lots of…
OpenTofu Github stats half a year after the fork. May 03, 2024 After the recent layoffs at Google that impacted open source maintainers of some prominent projects, I was curious to see what’s the state of other projects where the community had to step up involvement after the initial authors ceased their Open Source contributions. I saw a few people made similar comparisons for other forked…
Fixing regressions in 1.3.0: incompatibility with instances out of the DefaultVPC and Lambda timeout when replacing Spot instances April 29, 2024 Hello, After releasing AutoSpotting 1.3.0 a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working with a few customers who noticed a couple of regressions introduced in this latest version: AutoSpotting failed to launched instances except in the Default VPC…
After almost 8 months since the previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce not one, but two AutoSpotting releases at the same time, packed with lots of improvements. I was hoping to release this much earlier, but somehow each time we got quite close, customers reported yet another little but important edge case that would be be great to fix and then another and so on… This…
The Arm price/performance paradox In my cost optimization gigs I often see how many people don’t understand how Arm chips (such as AWS Graviton and Apple M1/M2) can be both cheaper and faster than x86 chips from Intel and AMD. It’s counter-intuitive, so many think that since Graviton is ~20% cheaper, it must also be slower. To explain this paradox, imagine two development teams: Team…
How ECS capacity providers inspired me to fix an ancient AutoSpotting issue July 04, 2023 I’m excited to announce that a new version of AutoSpotting is now available. For some context if you’re not familiar with AutoSpotting, it’s a tool that makes it easy to adopt Spot instances in existing Autoscaling groups, without requiring configuration changes, by replacing their instances…
And why we had to deploy NAT Gateways in our public subnets June 28, 2023 As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve been recently working with an AI startup to help them optimize their AWS costs. After quickly doing the basic things like converting EBS volumes to GP3 using EBSOptimizer , right-sized and converted their RDS databases to Graviton and a few other low hanging fruits,…
My thoughts on when to Kube or not to Kube… June 16, 2023 Hello again, In my previous post I explained the reasons why we ended up choosing ECS instead of Kubernetes for my current LeanerCloud customer. That post was mostly focused on the customer’s needs and how ECS was a better fit for them. That blog became pretty viral with over 20k views so far and I received a lot of feedback…
And how a cost optimization exercise often leads to deeper modernization of cloud applications June 08, 2023 It’s been a while since my last post here, and since then I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve been working with an innovative AI startup, helping them optimize their AWS cloud setup. At the same time I’ve been preparing an Udemy course on using ChatGPT for cloud-native…
Over the years many people asked us to explain the difference between AutoSpotting and standard Autoscaling groups, as well as between AutoSpotting Community edition and the commercial offering on the AWS Marketplace. We just added this feature comparison matrix on GitHub , so you can easily see how they all compare. Let us know if you have any further questions. -Cristian Keep reading [
And what you can do about it May 10, 2023 I’ve recently seen a post on HackerNews discussing an interesting article titled “Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances”, painting a pretty depressing picture of recent trends of EC2 Spot pricing. As someone building AWS cost optimization tooling that makes it easy for people to use Spot instances, I’m pretty familiar with this space…
Fixing ECS load balancer draining April 15, 2023 Over the last 7 years I’ve been working hard to make AutoSpotting the best solution for running Spot Instances in Autoscaling groups. Just a few days ago I released our biggest release ever which makes AutoSpotting managed groups of Spot instances even more resilient to low capacity situations than the vast majority of Autoscaling groups…
After less than 7 weeks from our previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce a new one, our biggest release so far in the entire 7 years history of AutoSpotting. It brings over a dozen improvements in performance, reliability, correctness and ease of use, including the following major enhancements: Proactive Spot instance launch on Spot terminations *, reducing the instance…
Hello and welcome to this week’s status update. Let’s dive tight in! AutoSpotting Architecture changes as result of my current customer onboarding This week was another one largely focused on AutoSpotting development, most of the work resulting from the conversation I had with the relatively large enterprise customer I started to onboard last week to AutoSpotting. This is high priority…
Hello and welcome to my latest weekly progress report. I’m a bit late to this week’s update, I normally do these on Fridays as a way for me to reflect on the previous week, but on Friday I was busy helping a new potentially large AutoSpotting customer get started. That didn’t leave me enough time to write this, but I’ll talk about the opportunity and the work itself towards the end of this…
Hello and welcome to this week’s progress report. This is also a bit of a special one, since it marks more than 6 months since I left AWS to double down on AutoSpotting development. Without further ado, let’s dive right in! Terraform updates I started the week by working on bringing the AutoSpotting Terraform module in sync with the CloudFormation template, after previously it was…
Hello, and welcome to this week’s update. Without further ado, let’s dive right in. Little recap from last week In my last week’s update I mentioned how I’ve been working most of the week helping a new customer onboard. They were reluctant to run the latest AutoSpotting version because of their blue-green deployment strategy, but they wanted to try an older version that…
Welcome to this week’s progress update. This was a shorter week than usual, as Monday had some family emergency and largely took the day off, but it was otherwise a pretty productive week, with many things moving forward and a lot of things to write about, so this is probably my longest update so far, but more technical than usual. It was again a week focused on development work, worked on…
Hello, and welcome to another weekly update. (I forgot to publish this last week here on beehiiv, so I’m now publishing it together with the current week’s update. The current week’s update will be scheduled 12h later, in order to accommodate beehiiv restrictions, sorry about that.) LeanerCloud GUI This week I continued the development of the new LeanerCloud GUI. I made a lot of…
Hello, and welcome to this week’s update. Without further ado, let’s dive right in. LeanerCloud GUI work I spent most of the week continuing the work I did last week, and here’s a little demo video that shows the progress I made and how the UI looks like so far: I’d love to hear your feedback about it, and what kind of things you’d like to see in this tool besides…
Hello, and welcome to this week’s update. Without further ado, let’s dive right in! LeanerCloud GUI work Like I mentioned last week, I started the week by working for a couple of days on the new LeanerCloud GUI tool, that would hopefully remove some of the friction of adopting my tools for new users. I now have code that reads all ASGs from the current region and generates a little…
Welcome to this week’s progress update. Let’s dive right in! Savings calculator integration on leanercloud.com I started the week by integrating the savings calculator spreadsheet I built last week into my leanercloud.com website. I also polished it a bit more and added a screenshot with some figures, to make it clear for people what to expect. AutoSpotting Intro recording I then…
Hello, and welcome to my latest weekly status update. This week was another good week for me, I’m very happy about my progress. LinkedIn Outreach I’ve recently started experimenting with cold outreach to drive some more sales, and I’ve been iterating on my messages. Over the last weekend I asked for some feedback in one of the online communities I’m in, where I started a…
Hi, Happy New Year, and welcome to the first weekly update from 2023 and the first one on Beehiiv! For more context, this is a continuation of my older AutoSpotting, Cloudutil newsletters, and going forward will mirror my current LinkedIn newsletter which I’ve been using for weekly updates for the last few months after I left Amazon AWS. You can check out my previous posts on LinkedIn.
Hello, I’m happy to announce that I finally left my full-time job last week, so this is my first status update as self-employed. Over the last few weeks I’ve been vacationing a lot So far there’s not much to share It’s been a while since my previous update in here, which was at the end of October. I’m now trying to resume these monthly updates, so in this first post…
Hello, As usual, here’s my latest monthly report. Going forward I’ll release these reports here on the CloudUtil blog and I’ll only share the link through my mailing list and our new Slack #announcements channel. If you want to be notified when I write a new one, don’t forget to sign up to the CloudUtil newsletter shown at the bottom of the page, or join us on Slack. I also…
Hello, As usual, here’s my latest monthly report. AutoSpotting Since the previous month there hasn’t been much going on in the mainline repo, at least not from my side. The only thing I did there was updating dependencies, including instance type information for the recently released M6i instance types. From the community side, I’m very thankful to mello7tre who contributed a…
Hello, As usual, here’s my monthly progress report, this time covering August 2021. AutoSpotting As I mentioned in my previous report, I’ve been working on releasing the new AutoSpotting stable build on the AWS Marketplace. After many months of hard work, I’m happy to announce that the release finally landed on the Marketplace a few days ago, and it’s probably the first…
Hello, Another month, another community update. This one comes about a week late as I’ve been on a long vacation and some things had to give. Progress report - July 2021 AutoSpotting - throughout my vacation I’ve been working a lot on a still unreleased branch that prepares AutoSpotting for being published on the AWS marketplace as a paid Docker product, charging a small percentage of…
Hello, Another month, another AutoSpotting community update. Progress report - June 2021 EBS-Optimizer - To be honest this month I haven’t made as much progress on AutoSpotting as I had hoped, but I started a couple of new workstreams which kept me busy. The first is EBS-Optimizer, my new tool dedicated for EBS volume upgrades from GP2 to GP3, resulting in up to 20% better cost and often…
Hello, As promised in my last monthly email, I’m now sharing monthly the progress achieved in the previous month and what’s coming soon. I’ve also resumed the monthly AskMeAnything-style community calls, and below you can see the recording of our previous one. (The recording of this call is unfortunately no longer available online.) Progress report May 2021 I helped polish…
Hello, It’s been a while since the previous status update and also I really missed seeing some of you like I did in our monthly webinars. I decided to give a status update for the last few months and considering it’s the beginning of the month going forward I’ll do my best to do this on a monthly basis, sharing the progress since the previous month and what’s coming soon.
Hello, I’m happy to announce that the massive code change that has been in development since more than a year ago has been merged and after a few further improvements it’s now ready for Alpha/Beta testing by a wider audience. What’s new? Event-based instance replacement In a nutshell, when deployed using the latest CloudFormation infrastructure code, AutoSpotting is now reacting…