May 2022 Summaries

Vantage has introduced Autopilot, a managed service designed to automatically optimize AWS costs by purchasing Reserved Instances, which can lead to savings of over 50% without requiring any upfront commitments or changes to infrastructure from users. By monitoring EC2 usage daily, Autopilot ensures optimal Reserved Instance coverage, and charges a competitive management fee of 5% of the savings found, significantly lower than the fees charged by other providers. This service is particularly beneficial for engineering teams that want to focus on application development rather than managing complex cost-saving strategies. Autopilot is available to all paying Vantage customers, except those in the free tier, and works exclusively with AWS, although plans to support GCP and Azure are in discussion. Once opted in, users can track savings and commitments through a dedicated dashboard, and have the flexibility to disable the service if desired, with options to either retain or sell Reserved Instances.

Vantage has introduced a new feature in its Cost Reports, allowing users to allocate cloud costs based on a percentage, enhancing the flexibility of cost management for shared resources. This feature enables users to specify a percentage between 1 and 100% for specific resources or sets of resources, which is particularly beneficial for allocating costs associated with shared databases or support bills to specific teams or services. Previously, Vantage allowed for cost filtering using logical conditions, but it did not support partial cost allocation. The percentage-based cost allocation is available for free to all Vantage users, including those on the free tier, and can be applied across multiple filter sets and integrated with existing API and reporting tools like email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. This initiative aims to provide a more precise cost distribution for users managing shared cloud resources, helping them better understand and optimize their cloud expenses.

Vantage has announced the integration of Fastly into its platform, marking the first cloud service provider to be supported alongside existing cloud infrastructure providers. This integration allows Vantage users to automatically ingest and visualize Fastly costs within the Vantage console, helping manage expenses across multiple service providers more efficiently. The platform now supports seamless viewing of Fastly costs alongside AWS and GCP data, offering detailed cost reports and daily data refreshes for up-to-date financial insights. Fastly users can effortlessly incorporate their cost data by generating a read-only API token, and Vantage plans to add support for additional providers like Datadog, MongoDB Atlas, Snowflake, and Cloudflare in the future. This development aims to save companies engineering hours by consolidating cost data in one place, and it is available to all Vantage users, including those on the free tier, although exceeding cost tiers may require a plan upgrade.

The article provides a detailed comparison of the pricing and use cases for two major content delivery networks (CDNs), Fastly and AWS CloudFront, exploring their cost-effectiveness, performance, and practical applications. Using examples from companies like LaunchDarkly and Slack, it highlights how Fastly's edge computing capabilities enable rapid, low-latency responses, while CloudFront excels in bandwidth efficiency, particularly benefiting API-driven applications. The analysis reveals that CloudFront can be substantially cheaper than Fastly in certain scenarios, but Fastly can flip the cost advantage with specific architectural adjustments. The discussion also touches on the broader factors influencing CDN selection, such as feature sets, developer experience, vendor lock-in, and the potential impact of financial commitment programs like AWS's Security Savings Bundle. The choice between Fastly and CloudFront ultimately depends on specific usage patterns and architectural requirements, demonstrating that cloud and CDN costs are closely tied to the underlying infrastructure and operational strategies.

Understanding and managing AWS cloud costs can be a complex task for engineers, akin to deciphering a detailed recipe with numerous ingredients. AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that can help break down costs by providing insights into various services, charge types, and usage patterns, although it may require additional permissions and incur extra charges itself. Key strategies include filtering costs by instance ID, understanding the EC2-Other category, utilizing AWS credits, leveraging cost allocation tags, and grouping by tags to better track expenditures. Additionally, users can monitor instance usage hours, forecast reserved instance costs, and evaluate savings plans for financial commitments. Vantage offers features that enhance Cost Explorer's capabilities, such as presenting EC2-Other costs more clearly and providing tools to manage savings plans, while emphasizing the importance of setting permissions correctly, especially in organizations with multiple AWS accounts, to streamline billing processes through AWS Organizations’ Consolidated Billing.

Vantage has announced an integration with Terraform Cloud, in partnership with HashiCorp, allowing Terraform Cloud users to have their cloud costs automatically posted to their workspace whenever infrastructure changes are made. This integration leverages HashiCorp's new Run Task API, enabling users to receive two types of cost summaries: a month-to-date cost summary and forecast, and cost recommendations that identify potential savings. These summaries help users analyze and optimize their cloud expenses by linking to detailed reports in the Vantage console. Importantly, this service is available at no additional cost to all Vantage users, including those on the free tier. The integration is designed to be secure, using Terraform Cloud's HMAC authentication scheme, and can be set up in around five minutes with no additional infrastructure required.