What is Expensive?
Before you start going through the AWS bill and get heart palpitations from the
amounts, it’s good to have an idea of what running your service should cost.
What can it cost? When does it become too expensive? Many projects have
absolutely no answers to these questions and therefore need the bill to become
very high before it feels right to react.
If you move your services from onsite hosting to the cloud, you have a kind of
target. I assume you move the services to gain new opportunities and achieve a
degree of freedom and flexibility that is difficult to recreate locally, but
costs should also be part of the picture. It is reasonable to expect that
operations will not become much more expensive in the cloud. Rather the opposite.
If you build new services, it is harder to assess what is the right price level.
But remember that it is not your private wallet paying the bill.
A useful exercise that puts prices in perspective is converting savings in
operations into expenses for labor or time lost to time to market. Spending
15,000 kroner on a consultant to reduce your AWS bill by $50 a month is probably
not a great deal — it won’t break even before three years.
Operational costs can also easily be assessed against revenue from the systems
being operated. This calculation should ideally be positive for the company.