Blog

AWS launches Database Savings Plans after years of customer requests, offering discounts up to 35% on serverless databases and 20% on instances across services.

For eight years, I’ve watched the same story play out: excited newcomers sign up for AWS thinking they have a free account, only to get blindsided by unexpected charges.

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.