What To Do When You’re Underwater on Your AWS EDP

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

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.

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

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

Yesterday, AWS lobbed a bit of a water balloon into my inbox.…

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?

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.

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.

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.

Duckbill’s FinOps maturity assessment methodology.

Duckbill breaks down their method of accessing thousands of client AWS accounts in a way that preserves ease-of-access, maintains data confidentiality, and still providing all the permissions needed.

When Corey and I started The Duckbill Group in 2019, I sat down with Corey and asked him to braindump everything he looks at when assessing a client’s AWS spend in the first pass. I then came up with a simple framework that’s easy to memorize and still serves us today. Step 1: Turn that […]