Want to start a FinOps program? The secret first step: do almost nothing. Just measure everything and show people the numbers. Let the gentle, persistent shame of a public dashboard work its magic. You'll be amazed how quickly costs go down. #finops

So you want to know how your cloud spend stacks up against the competition? Great. Do you also want to be profoundly mediocre? Chasing benchmarks strips away everything unique about your business. Compete with the only company that matters: yourself, last month. #finops

Should you use an AWS reseller? For the most part, no. But there are exactly three situations where they aren't a complete waste of time. If you're just buying AWS from them and getting nothing else, you've just added a useless—and expensive—middleman. #finops

The first San Francisco #FinOps meetup is *tonight* at 5:30! Come hang out! lu.ma/v75d6o5e

If you're in San Francisco on Tuesday, we're hosting the first ever San Francisco FinOps Meetup in FiDi! Join us! lu.ma/v75d6o5e

👏

I know I'm supposed to be in Vegas for re:Invent but, uhh, the Excel World Championship Finals are in Vegas at the same time 🤔

A whole lot of SaaS products have been touting their cost optimization capabilities since ZIRP ended. I think "can manage its own costs" is tablestakes for most SaaS products now to such a degree that it's not even worth mentioning in the core features--it's just _expected_.

Just realized every major Vegas strip hotel is now unionized. Venetian unionized last August. I wonder how long before "Relocate re:Invent" made it to someone's agenda--minutes? hours? 😆

Amazon acquiring Bee is a pretty strong admission that they can't make Alexa work. www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Just doin some wild shit in studio with @quinnypig.com today 🤘

Now that AWS fixed the free tier, I think the next biggest technical absurdity, in terms of a thing that seems like a decision made outside of technical considerations, is how you can't move an S3 bucket between accounts.

"Being a founder is, well, it actually sucks. It's oddly like being repeatedly punched in the face." 🤣 too real

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

In before an Amazon exec realizes a product team made something unique and interesting and ruins it by bringing it back into the fold a la Lightsail.

The problem I have with modern observability tools is that I feel like an idiot trying to figure out how to use them.

Ever wondered what is a day in the life of a server in an AWS data center ? @quinnypig.com has it covered for you www.lastweekinaws.co...

I'm hosting the @duckbillgroup.com office hours in ten minutes! If you have questions about #AWS contracts, cost optimization, or #FinOps in general, come on over! zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Want to know the most telling metric about cloud cost management tools? Check how many people actually USE them. Great tools matter, but without the right people driving your strategy, they're just expensive dashboards collecting dust.

Missing your AWS EDP commitment? Don’t panic. If you’re 10–15% underwater, doing nothing might be optimal since shortfall fees use discounted rates. Focus on total savings, not perfect forecasting.

Finance and Engineering need couples therapy when it comes to cloud costs. Finance wants confidence in the numbers and trajectory. Engineering thinks they need to defend every dollar. Better understanding leads to better outcomes. youtube.com/shorts/XY4Ax...

I have managed multiple teams at a company with a hybrid schedule. I have also been hiring pretty consistently for years now (basically until like a month ago). One thing I hear from candidates often is that they are actively excited to come into the office a few times a week to be around others.

You can skate by with informal knowledge and keeping state in people's heads and making it accessible via in-person conversation if you are in person. Mandatory written artifacts create a lot of overhead for many people if they are not reading and writing first people.

The foundation of cloud cost management isn't about optimization—it's about understanding why engineering teams make the decisions they do. Start there, and meaningful optimization follows.

This is great to see AWS centralizing info about their end of life products in one place! Hopefully I'll eventually be able to retire github.com/SummitRoute/... aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

Freeman & Forrest is a year old! It's been a wild, incredible journey and we've learned so much. I'm remembering an executive we pitched early on who called us a "small business for shitty little companies." Anyway, we've paid technical content creators $1.7M. I'm proud of that. fnf.dev/one-year

AWS VPC endpoint interface support for AZs is chaos. Of the 392 services these endpoints support, 75 services are not available in all AZs in us-east-1. You think, ok use1-az3 is probably missing support for some, because of course it is, because it's cursed and you'd be right, it's the worst, but

Your cloud cost management central team can't handle it all forever. The path to scale is through decentralization - equipping teams across the organization with the tools, standards, and processes to manage their own costs. Enable, don't control.

Pretty common case that we see $500k-$750k a month on cloudwatch logs in our enterprise customers. This is great.

Want to make a real dent in your AWS costs? Stop obsessing over turning off unused resources. Start examining your architectural choices. How you design your application matters more than how you optimize individual components. youtube.com/shorts/bVJYT...

Today's self-own: introducing the eng team to quines

Optimizing cost for using foundational models with Amazon Bedrock Amazon Bedrock cost optimization: Choose pricing options, select models wisely, optimize knowledge bases, use prompt caching, and leverage automated reasoning. Balance capability and cost with managed AI models on AWS.

We do a lot of hard work on whiteboards over here. Chief among them is this graph explaining the quality distribution of burritos in SF vs the national stage. 🌯🌯🌯

Great, ANOTHER reservation expression to keep track of. Just what absolutely no customer wanted.

That’s significant.

I was just last week trying to explain to someone in SF the difference between y'all, all y'all, and y'ouns

It is disturbing how quickly my accent returns when I’m surrounded by mountainfolk

Jumping ahead a few stages: I think all cost and usage data will eventually converge on this same data lake "you own your data and how you want to use it" model, and not just for capability reasons, but for data governance reasons too.

As someone working with teams on a regular basis about this: yes, most teams have no idea at all

Literally just came from an animated discussion about this over drinks. I've been working on a new piece (or pieces, or whitepaper, or book 🙈) on managing observability costs, since...early Feb? Afaict most engineering orgs have no mental model for their own COGS. And don't know how to find one.

I was at 6 MAU last October before my 'FinOps Fundamentals' training launch, and have been at 18 ever since. My goal is to double that with the new software we plan to license, additional training, and using our power users as internal evangelists.

Agree but also, if you have the wrong tool, people are not going to engage. They will wait for you to push info to them. I have 18 MAU on my current platform, and have people clamoring for access to a Gen2 platform I've POC'd and plan to license. I may hit 50+ MAU by EOY bc it's intuitive to use

Again reminding @quinnypig.com and @mikejulian.com that this exists and @duckbillgroup.com could also create a platypus savings box as a theme for marketing cloud savings.. 🤷🏾 (Bought in case either of them visits Australia - as a present).

Engineering time and cloud costs both matter when evaluating AWS optimizations. Sometimes acknowledging an inefficiency and choosing not to address it is the financially responsible decision. Consider the complete picture before diving into changes. youtube.com/shorts/5q-Ut...

“Clarity comes from designing views that serve a specific job and ensuring people know when and how to use them” I love when @johncutle.fish goes deep on organizational constructs and pokes at a theory I’m deeply engaging with rn. open.substack.com/pub/cutlefis...

Every cloud cost program seems to start with "Let's buy RIs and Savings Plans!" That's backwards. When you lock in discounts, you're also locking in your architectural decisions - good or bad. Start understanding your architecture, then the discounts.

It's always interesting watching industry trends. There was a time when absolutely everyone held themselves out as "devops experts" then it was observability now it's cloud cost management I probably missed a few waves in there, even 😆

Contract negotiation tip: “This is standard” and the like are best read as “please don’t look too closely at this, that was the only reasonable defense we had for it”

I'm about to do an AMA on Twitch about AWS, AWS bills, and basically anything else you want to heckle me about. Please come up with better questions than GenAI. twitch.tv/duckbillgroup

🚨 RIGHT NOW 🚨: @quinnypig.com live at Duckbill Office Hours. Bring your horrifying AWS bills, burning #FinOps questions, and loose convictions, strongly held. twitch.tv/duckbillgroup