Cloud cost - Cloud Cost Review

Cloud Cost Review

Will Pickeral, William Belle LLC · willpickeral@williambelle.co

Your cloud bill goes up and never comes back down. Most of what it went up for is still running, and some of it is not doing anything.

Nobody is watching it. The person who set the app up sized it for a launch that has already happened, the defaults were chosen for you, and every month since has quietly billed for the same capacity whether or not anything used it.

From $1,500 for one subscription. A written report, and a fixed price before I start.

What You Get

One document. It says where your money goes, what could come off the bill, and what each change would take.

Each item carries four things:

• What is happening now — the resource, the tier, and the number I read.
• What I suggest, in plain words.
• What it would save, each month.
• How involved it is, and what it could affect — so you can tell the ten-minute changes from the ones worth planning.

They are ordered by what you get back for the work, easiest first. Most owners do the top two or three the same week and leave the rest.

The report also lists what I checked and left alone. You are paying for the sweep as much as the findings, and a report that only lists problems is a list of whatever happened to be noticed.

Every Number Is an Estimate

I want to be plain about this, because the rest of the page is worth less if I am not.

Every figure in the report is read off what your app actually used during one billing period. Cloud prices change. Your usage changes. A change only proves what it saves once it is made. So the report says "an estimated $320 a month", never "this will save you $320" — and if anyone selling you this work phrases it the other way, ask them how they know.

What I can promise is the method: what I looked at, what I found, and where every number came from, written down so you can check it.

What I Actually Look At

Three sources: what you were actually billed, your cloud provider's own cost advice, and a hands-on look at how each resource is set up next to what it has really used.

The third one is the work. Your provider's built-in advice is the floor, not the ceiling — it is deliberately cautious, it prices everything at full rate, and it cannot see anything that needs reading a metric over time or understanding how your app is used. A few examples of what that misses:

• A plan bills for its size whether one app sits on it or none. Empty plans left behind by a migration bill forever, and nothing flags them.
• "Stopped" is not the same as "shut down". A machine switched off from the inside still bills for compute. Only the right kind of stop ends the charge.
• Memory is the number people skip. A plan can look busy on processor use and never come close to the memory it is paying for. That is only visible over 30 to 90 days, at the peak rather than the average, so you do not size below a real spike.
• Steady workloads paying the full hourly rate. Anything that has run unchanged for months can usually be committed to at a lower rate. This is often the single largest item, and it is the one the built-in advice under-suggests most.
• Logs nobody reads. Log collection is billed by the gigabyte and can reach the top of the bill on its own, usually because one setting is sending everything.

None of that is clever. It is just somebody looking.

What It Costs, and When Not to Buy It

From $1,500 for one subscription. Fixed, agreed before I start, and paid up front. More than one subscription is quoted.

If your cloud bill is under about $500 a month, do not buy this. There is not enough on a bill that size for the review to pay for itself, and I would rather say so here than take the work and hand you a report that saves you forty dollars. If that is you and you still want the bill looked at, it is included in the ongoing arrangements below at no extra charge.

Above that, the arithmetic is yours to do: the report tells you what it found, and you can compare that to what it cost in about a minute.

What This Is Not

Nothing is changed under this. I look, I write it down, and you decide. If you want me to make the changes, that is quoted separately once you have seen what they are — and you may well not need me for the easy ones.

It is not a security review. It is about money. If something I find has a security consequence I will say so, but that is not what I am looking for.

I do not need access to your data. See below.

What I Need From You

Read-only access to the subscription, and nothing more.

Two roles: one that lets me see how your resources are set up, and one that lets me see the bill. Neither lets me change anything, start anything, or read what is inside your database. I will tell you exactly which two to grant, you can watch me do the work, and you can withdraw both the day the report lands.

If your provider is not Microsoft Azure, ask me before you buy. The method is the same everywhere but the detail is not, and I would rather tell you it is outside what I do well than learn that halfway through.

Doing It Again

A bill that has been reviewed once drifts back. New resources get added, a test environment outlives the test, and the discount you committed to expires.

So this is also a standing part of An engineer on call and Keep your app running, as a check every three months. Those are quoted per client, and the review is included rather than billed on its own.

The repeat costs me much less than the first one, because the answers are already written down. What the second report adds is the part that matters: which of last quarter's changes actually landed, and what they took off the bill.

Getting Started

Tell me roughly what you spend and which cloud you are on. If it is worth doing I will send you a fixed price and the two roles to grant. If it is not, I will tell you that instead.