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Aurora DSQL: A Technical Marvel with a Pricing Randomizer

By Corey Quinn

In short: Amazon’s Aurora DSQL is a technical marvel, but its pricing is absolutely baffling. And I mean just that. They’re not gouging customers. It’s not unfair. How they arrived at their pricing makes sense given the product’s development constraints (presumably including things such as “thou shalt not lose us our corporate ass on this service, as we cannot make it up in volume”). It’s just monumentally confusing.

By holigil 27 on Unsplash

The Innovation–Optimization Continuum

By Corey Quinn

There’s a continuum, with “Innovation” on one end and “Optimization” on the other. Where are you?

Photo by Chris Maldonado on Unsplash

Lambda Logs Just Got a Whole Lot Cheaper*

By Eric Pullen

Finally! AWS brings tiered pricing to Lambda’s CloudWatch logs, potentially saving high-volume customers thousands, and adds S3 and Firehose as new logging destinations.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

RDS Reserved Instances: Where Did All the New Instance Types Go?

By Eric Pullen

AWS is excluding newer RDS instance types from Reserved Instance purchases. Is this oversight or the quiet continuation of their RI deprecation strategy?

EC2 Reserved Instances are Being Quietly Deprecated

By Corey Quinn

Something strange started happening at re:Invent last year: new EC2 instances started launching without Reserved Instance support.

Every Byte You Take: How Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget

By Eric Pullen

Remember the days of over-provisioned data centers, where enterprises hoarded servers like survivalists prepping for the apocalypse? The cloud promised to end all that with its pay-as-you-go model—but the reality isn’t so simple. From ingestion-based pricing traps to skyrocketing data movement costs, your AWS bill can balloon faster than a debug log filled with database dumps. In this post, we explore the true cost of cloud data management, share tips to rein in runaway expenses, and help you decide: Is the cloud truly better for your bottom line?

AWS’s Valkey Play: When a Fork Becomes a Price Cut

By Corey Quinn

In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts.

The Duckbill Guide to AWS Reserved Instances

By Mike Julian

We’re sharing the must-know facts and insights about RIs based on our extensive experience fixing our clients’ horrifying AWS bills through our work here at The Duckbill Group. In this article, you’ll learn what RIs are, how to pay for them, how they’re applied, and interesting edge cases.

The Duckbill Guide to AWS Savings Plans

By Mike Julian

We’re sharing what we’ve learned about SPs based on The Duckbill Group’s extensive experience fixing our clients’ horrifying AWS bills. In this article, you’ll learn what SPs are, how to pay for them, and how they’re applied.

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