April 2021 Summaries

Vantage has introduced its Cloud Pricing API in Beta, allowing users to access cloud infrastructure and service provider pricing data programmatically, starting with AWS EC2 prices. This API provides a structured and intuitive way for users to interact with cloud pricing data and is available for free to registered Vantage users, who can access it by generating an API Access Token. The API currently offers on-demand pricing information for EC2 instances, including details such as memory, vCPU, GPU, clock speed, and network performance. Vantage is seeking user feedback to expand the API's capabilities and plans to add future write functionality. The API, which has client library support in Ruby and JavaScript, aims to support more languages and features based on user input.

AWS Fargate offers a serverless computing solution that allows users to run containerized workloads without managing the underlying infrastructure, but this convenience comes with a cost premium compared to self-managed EC2 clusters. Fargate uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on vCPU and GB of RAM usage, with rates varying by operating system and CPU architecture, and includes ephemeral storage with additional costs for excess usage. Although Fargate simplifies operations by abstracting server management, it generally charges higher rates than equivalent EC2 instances, such as a 16% premium over c5.xlarge, 21% over m5.xlarge, and 40% over t3.xlarge instances. Fargate Spot offers potential savings of up to 70% but requires applications to be fault-tolerant due to possible interruptions. While Fargate can save operational time, managing one's own EC2 instances can lead to cost savings and performance improvements, especially when dealing with predictable compute patterns.

Brooke McKim has joined Vantage as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, bringing extensive experience from his previous roles as Head of Product at Stae and Director of Product at DigitalOcean, where he witnessed significant company growth. CEO Ben Schaechter expressed enthusiasm about reuniting with Brooke, praising his deep understanding of public cloud infrastructure and leadership abilities. Brooke is motivated by his passion for solving problems and building products for developers, with a focus on improving the interaction between engineering and finance, especially in managing AWS costs. He will lead product and engineering initiatives at Vantage, aiming to optimize cloud spending and enhance business operations.

Vantage has introduced team support, enabling users to invite unlimited team members to their Vantage organization at no additional cost, thereby eliminating the previous limitation of a single user account with shared credentials. This new feature allows users to invite others via email and assign them roles as either "owners" or "members," where owners can manage team invitations and access, while members can view resources and costs. Team support is available to all users by default, and there is no limit on the number of invitees. Existing Vantage users are automatically designated as owners, giving them the ability to manage their teams, and the feature aims to enhance collaboration and streamline access to cloud cost dashboards.