AWS Cost Allocation Guide: Tagging Best Practices

Cloud finance is more “cloud” than “finance.” This fundamental misunderstanding leads to very ineffective cloud finance efforts. Here’s how to fix them.

As Cloud Economists, we’re often asked when it makes sense for an object to be in Amazon S3’s Intelligent-Tiering (“S3-IT”) storage class. The answer, as is unfortunately often the case in the world of consulting, is “it depends”. There are two primary considerations before you jump into S3-IT: an object’s access pattern and its size. […]

Storytelling can change the narrative of your cloud cost management strategy by opening up communication and sharing business context across your organization.

Understanding AWS spend is a big pain point for companies, but cloud cost allocation can help. In the second part of this series, we’re focusing on what to do with your cloud cost data once it’s generated.

AWS offers a lot of options to save money by committing to a certain level of spend that you can get without dealing with an Accounting Team. We break down how they work and what strategy works best for your spend.

At The Duckbill Group, our clients repeatedly tell us the same thing: We need to know why our AWS bill went up. In fact, gaining better visibility into your cloud spend is one of the biggest pain points you will encounter with AWS.  For organizations moving from the data center world, AWS is a completely […]

I hate writing job descriptions. I always feel like I’m going to inadvertently write a job description for a purple squirrel.  I know who we are as a company; that part’s easy to write. But how much do I know about what we’re looking for in a candidate?  Are we basing the job description off […]

We take our role in protecting our clients quite seriously, and that starts with aligning incentives.

In February 2020, we began building what would become DuckTools, a new AWS cost management SaaS tool, modeled off of our extensive internal tools we built for our consulting projects. We launched to the world in private beta in December 2020.

This month, we shuttered it.

Let’s talk about why.

Don’t worry, Reserved Instances will still be around. You just don’t have to think about them anymore unless you want to.

When it comes to the exact cost cross-AZ data transfer, the AWS documentation is a bit ambiguous. So I ran a little experiment to figure out how much it costs to move data between availability zones in the same region.