A screenshot of The Cloud Cost Handbook
Today Vantage has announced the launch of the "Cloud Cost Handbook", an open-source and community-supported set of guides and best practices that helps educate developers, engineering leaders and finance counterparts on the topic of managing cloud costs. Anyone can access the Cloud Cost Handbook to learn about general topics (such as committed-use discounts and rightsizing) as well as per provider service pages (cost considerations specifically for Amazon EC2 or S3). The Cloud Cost Handbook is hosted at handbook.vantage.sh and its content is hosted on Github at https://github.com/vantage-sh/handbook for the community to watch, edit and contribute to.
From speaking with customers, we've found that there is a general lack of awareness for a large number of concepts and practices for observing, curbing and controlling cloud costs. Typically this knowledge is contained by a few key individuals and isn't well known amongst the broader community. People typically rely on a few key voices on Twitter for surfacing certain concepts, working with expensive and oftentimes inaccessible cloud consultants or digging through pages of complex documentation that may not even cover the topic they're looking for.
Using our employees' backgrounds at public cloud infrastructure and service companies like AWS, Cloudflare and DigitalOcean, we've compiled an initial set of concepts and per AWS-service pieces of content that can be helpful for understanding topics related to cloud costs. As we work with our customers and find relevant concepts, we try to capture the knowledge and contribute it to the handbook. Additionally, anyone is open to contribute their knowledge on the open-source Github repository.
The Cloud Cost Handbook has some initial topics and services covered already but we're looking to solicit for contributions from the community so everyone can benefit from knowledge sharing. Visit the Cloud Cost Handbook at https://handbook.vantage.sh/ or star or contribute to the Github repository at https://github.com/vantage-sh/handbook
Frequently Asked Questions
What is being launched today?
Today Vantage is launching The Cloud Cost Handbook, hosted at handbook.vantage.sh, and available to anyone on the public internet. The Cloud Cost Handbook has a list of best practices and plain-english explanations for how to control cloud costs.
The source of this content is hosted on Github at https://github.com/vantage-sh/handbook and anyone may contribute, edit, or update it by issuing a pull request to the repo.
Who is the customer?
The customer is anyone on the internet who has an interest in learning more about topics related to cloud infrastructure and service costs. This is available to anyone regardless of whether or not they're a customer of AWS or Vantage.
How is the Cloud Cost Handbook organized?
The Cloud Cost Handbook is broken up into two sections: (1) general concepts and (2) AWS Services. General Concepts are meant for topics that apply to multiple services. Specific AWS Services are meant to give a summary of the service from a pricing perspective, a list of its pricing dimensions and specific cost concepts scoped to that service. We are looking to add additional provider services to the handbook as well from the community.
Can I share links to the Cloud Cost Handbook?
Yes. Each section and subsection is linked and shareable. You can share links to general concepts, each individual service as well as specific concepts for each service. We are trying out best to maintain link structures so the handbook may be references in other publications.
How much does this cost?
The Cloud Cost Handbook is provided free of charge.
How do I make contributions to the Cloud Cost Handbook?
You can make contributions to the handbook by issuing a pull request or opening an issue on our open source repository here: https://github.com/vantage-sh/handbook
How do I give feedback on the Cloud Cost Handbook?
You can give feedback on the cloud cost handbook by joining the "#cloud-cost-handbook" channel of the Slack Community or by emailing support@vantage.sh.
Under what license is this content released to the public?
This content is released under the creative commons license CC BY-NC-SA which lets others remix, adapt, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit Vantage and license their new creations under the identical terms.
This is named the Cloud Cost Handbook but I only see content for AWS - will there be support for other cloud infrastructure and service providers?
Yes. We are looking for community contributions for other public cloud providers such as Azure and GCP.
I like this idea but don’t feel comfortable contributing. How can I support it?
We don't expect everyone to contribute to the handbook. You can support it by sharing it with your network on Twitter/LinkedIn, internally at your company, or starring the Github repository.
