AWS on AutoSpotting

How can Arm chips like AWS Graviton or Apple M1/2 be faster and cheaper than x86 chips from Intel or AMD

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 x86 has 4 engineers and 6 managers
Team Arm has 6 engineers and 2 managers

That’s how you can get 50% more output at 20% less costs.

New AutoSpotting Release: Mixed Autoscaling Groups Support

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 with Spot clones using attach/detach API calls.

For more information about AutoSpotting you can have a look at AutoSpotting.io or check out our Open Source code on GitHub.

How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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, the bulk of the work was about converting their individual instances running Docker-compose to ECS.

Why Kubernetes Wasn't a Good Fit for Us

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 saying that it was contrarian, and that I should have talked more about where Kubernetes makes sense and why it didn’t make sense for us at this stage.

Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 software development with a DevOps focus.

In this post I’ll talk about my work with this startup, my thought process and what I recommended them, including the potentially controversial recommendation mentioned in the title.

My Thoughts on the Current State of EC2 Spot Pricing

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My thoughts on the current state of EC2 Spot pricing

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 so thought I’d share my 2 cents about this current situation and wanted to also offer a few suggestions to Spot users who want to still get the most of Spot instances.