AWS Finally Fixes Its Free Tier Problem

Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.

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.

Underwater? Let’s go swimming. You have options…

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.