LeanerCloud - Your Cloud Optimization Specialists on LeanerCloud

Free Audit

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:15:34 +1000

We try to understand your workload and the particular challenges you’re facing in order to see how we can help you out

The Audit

We set up an initial Zoom call with some of your engineers, in which after we briefly introduce ourselves we do a deep dive into your application’s cloud architecture.

Depending on the type of engagement we may look into different things, but since many of our engagements are related to cost optimization, let’s consider this type of engagement. Other types of engagements are similar in the way we operate, we just use different tools and look into different things.

Cost/Performance Optimization

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

We cover a wide range of AWS resources starting from the usual compute, storage and networking services, and many more

Common Challenges

Cost challenges are very common in the post-Lift&Shift migration phase. Many customers often end up with an oversized, mostly idle cloud environment that largely replicates their previous on-prem environment, but at much higher operating costs.

Such customers are getting the main cloud drawbacks without getting the benefits and may end up questioning their decision to migrate to the cloud in the first place. Some also wish they chose a different cloud provider, or actively pursue a migration to another cloud since the grass is always greener on the other side, only to notice the same issues after their migration to another provider.

Advisory

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:14:39 +1000

Besides the free cost optimization audit, we can also cover paid auditing and advisory services related to Cloud governance, DevOps, and other operational topics.

Best practices

Companies often struggle getting started or have doubts about their existing cloud governance framework. Similarly, they may want to assess their situation when it comes to adopting industry standard best practices including DevOps, CI/CD, InnerSource and testing automation.

We can audit your current situation and determine actions that you can take to improve your company from these perspectives.

Due Diligence

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:15:26 +1000

If you are considering buying or selling a company, we can help you throughout the entire process, identifying and addressing technical debt in the cloud infrastructure.

For buyers

We can help you perform the technical due diligence for cloud infrastructure from the cost, performance and security standpoints. We help you ensure you’re paying the right price for your new acquisition, avoiding unpleasant surprises after the sale closes.

For sellers

We can support you at making your business more cost-effective and mature from the cloud computing perspective, and therefore more appealing for prospective buyers.

Open Source Support

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:15:26 +1000

If you are considering using our open source software we can help you get started, customize and get the most of it.

About Our CloudUtil tools

Over the years we built a portfolio of open source tools mainly geared towards cost optimization, automating some repeatable patterns we see in our customer engagements.

We make supported builds of these tools available on the AWS Marketplace, for a small percentage of the generated savings, mainly geared towards small and medium companies.

New AutoSpotting release - 1.2.1-6

Mon, 26 May 2025 13:23:12 +0000

Instance deregistration from ECS clusters

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 28, 2023

Hello,

I’m happy to announce a new release of AutoSpotting, which now also drains ECS tasks from terminating EC2 instances, making sure no new tasks are scheduled on them and triggering the immediate launch of new replacement tasks by ECS.

You can get it as usual on the AWS Marketplace. This feature is so far only available from CloudFormation but Terraform support will be made available soon, stay tuned.

Releasing additional Terraform building blocks to the LeanerCloud ONCE bundle

Mon, 26 May 2025 13:23:12 +0000

Announcing a new release to the LeanerCloud ONCE bundle, which consists of the Terraform serverless microservice building blocks.

The bundle also contains the Optimizer CLI FinOps tool for GP2 to GP3 conversion for EC2 and EDS, and rightsizing with conversion to Graviton for RDS, Elasticache and OpenSearch, released previously.

These Terraform building blocks are a set of example Terraform modules for building serverless applications using Lambda and ECS Fargate. They will have a slightly different license from the CLI tools, which will allow you to use them to build proprietary products and use within your team, which is not permitted for the CLI tools.

Another new AutoSpotting release in less than a week

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:20:14 +0000

Fixing ECS load balancer draining

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 15, 2023

Over the last 7 years I’ve been working hard to make AutoSpotting the best solution for running Spot Instances in Autoscaling groups.

Just a few days ago I released our biggest release ever which makes AutoSpotting managed groups of Spot instances even more resilient to low capacity situations than the vast majority of Autoscaling groups configured with a single OnDemand instance type.

New AutoSpotting release - 1.2.1-6

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:20:14 +0000

Instance deregistration from ECS clusters

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 28, 2023

Hello,

You can get it as usual on the AWS Marketplace. This feature is so far only available from CloudFormation but Terraform support will be made available soon, stay tuned.

Weekly Update - 13 Mar 2023

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:20:14 +0000

Building Tooling, New Open Source release, Github issue triage, Sales and Marketing, Onboarding a new customer,AutoSpotting Terraform Improvements, Raving testimonial, EBS Optmizer news

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 13, 2023

Hello and welcome to my latest weekly progress report.

I’m a bit late to this week’s update, I normally do these on Fridays as a way for me to reflect on the previous week, but on Friday I was busy helping a new potentially large AutoSpotting customer get started.

Weekly Update - 24 Feb 2023

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:20:14 +0000

Exciting AutoSpotting features and new releases on the AWS Marketplace, Customer help, Marketplace tooling, Bulk EBS volume tagging for EBS Optimizer

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 24, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Little recap from last week

In my last week’s update I mentioned how I’ve been working most of the week helping a new customer onboard.

They were reluctant to run the latest AutoSpotting version because of their blue-green deployment strategy, but they wanted to try an older version that still works in the legacy cron mode. They were initially very happy about the way I supported them to use an older version, and even said it was the best support they ever got from a vendor.

Weekly Update - 3 Feb 2023

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:20:14 +0000

LeanerCloud GUI progress, Podcast news

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 03, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

LeanerCloud GUI work

I spent most of the week continuing the work I did last week, and here’s a little demo video that shows the progress I made and how the UI looks like so far:

I’d love to hear your feedback about it, and what kind of things you’d like to see in this tool besides what I mentioned in the demo.

AutoSpotting comparison matrix

Wed, 07 May 2025 23:54:32 +0000

Easily see the difference between ASGs and the available AutoSpotting options.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 15, 2023

Hello,

Over the years many people asked us to explain the difference between AutoSpotting and standard Autoscaling groups, as well as between AutoSpotting Community edition and the commercial offering on the AWS Marketplace.

We just added this feature comparison matrix on GitHub, so you can easily see how they all compare.

New AutoSpotting bugfix release - 1.3.1

Wed, 07 May 2025 23:54:32 +0000

Fixing regressions in 1.3.0: incompatibility with instances out of the DefaultVPC and Lambda timeout when replacing Spot instances

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 29, 2024

Hello,

After releasing AutoSpotting 1.3.0 a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working with a few customers who noticed a couple of regressions introduced in this latest version:

AutoSpotting failed to launched instances except in the Default VPC (major).
AutoSpotting Lambda timeouts while waiting for terminated Spot instances to be in Running State in case the Grace Period is longer than 2 minutes (medium), resulting in failure to clear suspended ASG. processes**.**

This release is meant to address those and is strongly recommended to users that don’t use Default VPCs for EC2 instances launched by AutoSpotting.

Weekly Update - 17 Feb 2023

Wed, 07 May 2025 23:54:32 +0000

AutoSpotting OSS news, ec2-instances-info updates, instance type data API, ec2instances.info data fix, RI and Savings plan awareness, OSS mass tagging, helping customers, Terraform fixes

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 17, 2023

Hello,

Welcome to this week’s progress update.

This was a shorter week than usual, as Monday had some family emergency and largely took the day off, but it was otherwise a pretty productive week, with many things moving forward and a lot of things to write about, so this is probably my longest update so far, but more technical than usual.

Weekly Update - 3 Mar 2023

Wed, 07 May 2025 23:54:32 +0000

Terraform updates, Spot Savings Estimator release, website and AWS Marketplace copy updates

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 03, 2023

Hello and welcome to this week’s progress report.

This is also a bit of a special one, since it marks more than 6 months since I left AWS to double down on AutoSpotting development.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

Terraform updates

I started the week by working on bringing the AutoSpotting Terraform module in sync with the CloudFormation template, after previously it was rolling out an ancient release of AutoSpotting from October 2021, with lots of known issues.

Forking ec2instances.info as a vendor-neutral alternative at cloud-instances.info

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:16:42 +0000

About ec2instances.info

Most people using AWS for enough time end up using the ec2instances.info website (a.k.a. instances.vantage.sh) to conveniently compare EC2 instance types across families based on specs and pricing.

It’s basically an online spreadsheet with a lot of data about all cloud instance types and filters to slice and dice that data, as you can see below:

The ec2instances.info Open Source project

Few users realize that this very useful website is backed by an open source project.

My thoughts on the current state of EC2 Spot pricing

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:16:42 +0000

And what you can do about it

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 10, 2023

I’ve recently seen a post on HackerNews discussing an interesting article titled “Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances”, painting a pretty depressing picture of recent trends of EC2 Spot pricing.

As someone building AWS cost optimization tooling that makes it easy for people to use Spot instances, I’m pretty familiar with this space so thought I’d share my 2 cents about this current situation and wanted to also offer a few suggestions to Spot users who want to still get the most of Spot instances.

Weekly Update - 13 Mar 2023

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:16:42 +0000

Building Tooling, New Open Source release, Github issue triage, Sales and Marketing, Onboarding a new customer,AutoSpotting Terraform Improvements, Raving testimonial, EBS Optmizer news

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 13, 2023

Hello and welcome to my latest weekly progress report.

Weekly Update - 17 Mar 2023

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:16:42 +0000

Deep dive into the AutoSpotting Architecture and a few changes I did this week. PoC progress. Presentation of Savings Estimator and AutoSpotting

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 17, 2023

Hello and welcome to this week’s status update.

Let’s dive tight in!

AutoSpotting Architecture changes as result of my current customer onboarding

This week was another one largely focused on AutoSpotting development, most of the work resulting from the conversation I had with the relatively large enterprise customer I started to onboard last week to AutoSpotting.

Weekly Update - 6 Jan 2023

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:16:42 +0000

Using ChatGPT for starting a new tool.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 06, 2023

Hi, Happy New Year, and welcome to the first weekly update from 2023 and the first one on Beehiiv!

For more context, this is a continuation of my older AutoSpotting, Cloudutil newsletters, and going forward will mirror my current LinkedIn newsletter which I’ve been using for weekly updates for the last few months after I left Amazon AWS. You can check out my previous posts on LinkedIn.

How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:49:03 +0000

And why we had to deploy NAT Gateways in our public subnets

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 28, 2023

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve been recently working with an AI startup to help them optimize their AWS costs.

After quickly doing the basic things like converting EBS volumes to GP3 using EBSOptimizer, right-sized and converted their RDS databases to Graviton and a few other low hanging fruits, the bulk of the work was about converting their individual instances running Docker-compose to ECS.

New AutoSpotting bugfix release - 1.3.1

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:49:03 +0000

Fixing regressions in 1.3.0: incompatibility with instances out of the DefaultVPC and Lambda timeout when replacing Spot instances

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 29, 2024

Hello,

After releasing AutoSpotting 1.3.0 a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working with a few customers who noticed a couple of regressions introduced in this latest version:

AutoSpotting failed to launched instances except in the Default VPC (major).
AutoSpotting Lambda timeouts while waiting for terminated Spot instances to be in Running State in case the Grace Period is longer than 2 minutes (medium), resulting in failure to clear suspended ASG. processes**.**

This release is meant to address those and is strongly recommended to users that don’t use Default VPCs for EC2 instances launched by AutoSpotting.

Weekly Update - 24 Feb 2023

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:49:03 +0000

Exciting AutoSpotting features and new releases on the AWS Marketplace, Customer help, Marketplace tooling, Bulk EBS volume tagging for EBS Optimizer

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 24, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Little recap from last week

In my last week’s update I mentioned how I’ve been working most of the week helping a new customer onboard.

Weekly Update - 27 Jan 2023

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:49:03 +0000

LeanerCloud GUI, Website updates, Infrastructure improvements with Terraform and ChatGPT, Podcast news, Karpenter

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 27, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

LeanerCloud GUI work

Like I mentioned last week, I started the week by working for a couple of days on the new LeanerCloud GUI tool, that would hopefully remove some of the friction of adopting my tools for new users.

Why Kubernetes wasn't a good fit for us

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:49:03 +0000

My thoughts on when to Kube or not to Kube…

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 16, 2023

Hello again,

In my previous post I explained the reasons why we ended up choosing ECS instead of Kubernetes for my current LeanerCloud customer.

That post was mostly focused on the customer’s needs and how ECS was a better fit for them.

That blog became pretty viral with over 20k views so far and I received a lot of feedback saying that it was contrarian, and that I should have talked more about where Kubernetes makes sense and why it didn’t make sense for us at this stage.

Current OpenTofu contributors vs. pledged FTEs

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:09 +0000

OpenTofu Github stats half a year after the fork.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 03, 2024

After the recent layoffs at Google that impacted open source maintainers of some prominent projects, I was curious to see what’s the state of other projects where the community had to step up involvement after the initial authors ceased their Open Source contributions.

I saw a few people made similar comparisons for other forked projects in the past. As an infra guy myself, I immediately thought about OpenTofu, now that we’re more than half a year after the fork from Terraform, they recently had a massive release, and also had some interesting shenanigans with Hashicorp’s lawyers accusing them of stealing their precious IP.

New AutoSpotting releases

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:09 +0000

Releasing AutoSpotting 1.3.0(new features) and 1.2.3(important billing bugfix)

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 11, 2024

After almost 8 months since the previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce not one, but two AutoSpotting releases at the same time, packed with lots of improvements.

I was hoping to release this much earlier, but somehow each time we got quite close, customers reported yet another little but important edge case that would be be great to fix and then another and so on…

Weekly Update - 10 Feb 2023

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:09 +0000

GUI progress, outreach to OSS users, github scraper

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 10, 2023

Hello, and welcome to another weekly update.

(I forgot to publish this last week here on beehiiv, so I’m now publishing it together with the current week’s update. The current week’s update will be scheduled 12h later, in order to accommodate beehiiv restrictions, sorry about that.)

LeanerCloud GUI

This week I continued the development of the new LeanerCloud GUI.

Weekly Update - 17 Feb 2023

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:09 +0000

AutoSpotting OSS news, ec2-instances-info updates, instance type data API, ec2instances.info data fix, RI and Savings plan awareness, OSS mass tagging, helping customers, Terraform fixes

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 17, 2023

Hello,

Welcome to this week’s progress update.

Why Kubernetes wasn't a good fit for us

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:09 +0000

My thoughts on when to Kube or not to Kube…

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 16, 2023

Hello again,

In my previous post I explained the reasons why we ended up choosing ECS instead of Kubernetes for my current LeanerCloud customer.

That post was mostly focused on the customer’s needs and how ECS was a better fit for them.

My thoughts on the current state of EC2 Spot pricing

Fri, 03 May 2024 21:31:08 +0000

And what you can do about it

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 10, 2023

Vantage just updated ec2instances.info and released all their code, now what?

Fri, 03 May 2024 21:31:08 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed, Vantage recently updated ec2instances.info with a new refreshed look and feel.

Over the weekend I had a deep-dive into their changes and thought about what to do with the cloud-instances.info fork I launched just a few weeks ago.

Why I forked it in the first place?

I covered this in more depth in my initial post, but basically when I decided to fork it, their main public code base hadn’t been touched in the last 6 months, and barely touched in the last year, except for a couple of my pull requests.

Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend

Fri, 03 May 2024 21:31:08 +0000

This is an expanded version of a LinkedIn post I wrote the other day.

The first email I read this week was this one I received from a billionaire friend, who wanted to talk to me on very short notice:

He’s the founder and CEO of a pretty large and well known company he still largely owns, and I respect him a lot so I won’t reveal his identity.

AutoSpotting comparison matrix

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:03:29 +0000

Easily see the difference between ASGs and the available AutoSpotting options.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 15, 2023

Hello,

We just added this feature comparison matrix on GitHub, so you can easily see how they all compare.

How can Arm chips like AWS Graviton or Apple M1/2 be faster and cheaper than x86 chips from Intel or AMD

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:50:44 +0000

The Arm price/performance paradox

In my cost optimization gigs I often see how many people don’t understand how Arm chips (such as AWS Graviton and Apple M1/M2) can be both cheaper and faster than x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

It’s counter-intuitive, so many think that since Graviton is ~20% cheaper, it must also be slower.

To explain this paradox, imagine two development teams:

Team x86 has 4 engineers and 6 managers
Team Arm has 6 engineers and 2 managers

That’s how you can get 50% more output at 20% less costs.

Weekly Update - 3 Mar 2023

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:50:44 +0000

Terraform updates, Spot Savings Estimator release, website and AWS Marketplace copy updates

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 03, 2023

Hello and welcome to this week’s progress report.

This is also a bit of a special one, since it marks more than 6 months since I left AWS to double down on AutoSpotting development.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

Terraform updates

Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:50:44 +0000

And how a cost optimization exercise often leads to deeper modernization of cloud applications

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 08, 2023

It’s been a while since my last post here, and since then I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve been working with an innovative AI startup, helping them optimize their AWS cloud setup. At the same time I’ve been preparing an Udemy course on using ChatGPT for cloud-native software development with a DevOps focus.

New AutoSpotting releases

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 15:54:28 +0000

Releasing AutoSpotting 1.3.0(new features) and 1.2.3(important billing bugfix)

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 11, 2024

After almost 8 months since the previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce not one, but two AutoSpotting releases at the same time, packed with lots of improvements.

Progress report for the first week after forking ec2instances.info

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 15:54:28 +0000

It’s been a little more than a week since I decided to fork ec2instances.info as cloud-instances.info, which I announced publicly last Thursday.

While in my previous post I mostly focused on the context around this fork and how I got to it, on this post I want to talk a bit about what happened after after I decided to fork the project over the last few days and where we’re at right now.

Weekly Update - 13 Jan 2023

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:30:00 +0000

New EBS Optimizer release, guest speaker podcast recording, savings calculator.

January 14, 2023

Hello, and welcome to my latest weekly status update.

This week was another good week for me, I’m very happy about my progress.

LinkedIn Outreach

I’ve recently started experimenting with cold outreach to drive some more sales, and I’ve been iterating on my messages.

Over the last weekend I asked for some feedback in one of the online communities I’m in, where I started a thread in which I asked how to make my messages less spammy and intrusive.

Weekly Update - 17 Mar 2023

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:30:00 +0000

Deep dive into the AutoSpotting Architecture and a few changes I did this week. PoC progress. Presentation of Savings Estimator and AutoSpotting

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
March 17, 2023

Hello and welcome to this week’s status update.

Let’s dive tight in!

AutoSpotting Architecture changes as result of my current customer onboarding

Weekly Update - 6 Jan 2023

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:30:00 +0000

Using ChatGPT for starting a new tool.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 06, 2023

Hi, Happy New Year, and welcome to the first weekly update from 2023 and the first one on Beehiiv!

How we maximized task density on our ECS cluster by avoiding burstable instances

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:47:28 +0000

And why we had to deploy NAT Gateways in our public subnets

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 28, 2023

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve been recently working with an AI startup to help them optimize their AWS costs.

Weekly Update - 13 Jan 2023

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:47:28 +0000

New EBS Optimizer release, guest speaker podcast recording, savings calculator.

January 14, 2023

Hello, and welcome to my latest weekly status update.

This week was another good week for me, I’m very happy about my progress.

LinkedIn Outreach

I’ve recently started experimenting with cold outreach to drive some more sales, and I’ve been iterating on my messages.

Over the last weekend I asked for some feedback in one of the online communities I’m in, where I started a thread in which I asked how to make my messages less spammy and intrusive.

Weekly Update - 20 Jan 2023

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:47:28 +0000

AutoSpotting intro video, Spot masterclass podcast, Twitter’ing, writing code, collaborations

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 20, 2023

Welcome to this week’s progress update. Let’s dive right in!

Savings calculator integration on leanercloud.com

I started the week by integrating the savings calculator spreadsheet I built last week into my leanercloud.com website. I also polished it a bit more and added a screenshot with some figures, to make it clear for people what to expect.

Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:47:28 +0000

And how a cost optimization exercise often leads to deeper modernization of cloud applications

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
June 08, 2023

Adopting the ONCE model for all my CLI FinOps tools and Terraform building blocks

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 10:30:28 +0000

I decided to release all the CLI tools and Terraform building blocks I use in my customers engagements under the 37signals ONCE Model, and under their ONCE source-available license.

What’s included?

For now this release only includes Optimizer, my flagship CLI tool for automated optimization of AWS resources which I use all the time in my service engagements to save my customers lots of money.

The main use case for the Optimizer tool is for mass-optimization of any or even all of the supported resources within your AWS account, and it is mainly built for hands-on FinOps consultants or people doing large optimization initiatives like I do for my customers.

Weekly Update - 20 Jan 2023

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 10:30:28 +0000

AutoSpotting intro video, Spot masterclass podcast, Twitter’ing, writing code, collaborations

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 20, 2023

Welcome to this week’s progress update. Let’s dive right in!

Savings calculator integration on leanercloud.com

Weekly Update - 3 Feb 2023

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 10:30:28 +0000

LeanerCloud GUI progress, Podcast news

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 03, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

LeanerCloud GUI work

I spent most of the week continuing the work I did last week, and here’s a little demo video that shows the progress I made and how the UI looks like so far:

I’d love to hear your feedback about it, and what kind of things you’d like to see in this tool besides what I mentioned in the demo.

Another new AutoSpotting release in less than a week

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

Fixing ECS load balancer draining

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 15, 2023

Over the last 7 years I’ve been working hard to make AutoSpotting the best solution for running Spot Instances in Autoscaling groups.

Current OpenTofu contributors vs. pledged FTEs

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

OpenTofu Github stats half a year after the fork.

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
May 03, 2024

Forking ec2instances.info as a vendor-neutral alternative at cloud-instances.info

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

About ec2instances.info

Most people using AWS for enough time end up using the ec2instances.info website (a.k.a. instances.vantage.sh) to conveniently compare EC2 instance types across families based on specs and pricing.

It’s basically an online spreadsheet with a lot of data about all cloud instance types and filters to slice and dice that data, as you can see below:

The ec2instances.info Open Source project

Few users realize that this very useful website is backed by an open source project.

LeanerCloud Product Updates

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

New AutoSpotting release - 1.2.0-2

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
April 12, 2023

New AutoSpotting release

After less than 7 weeks from our previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce a new one, our biggest release so far in the entire 7 years history of AutoSpotting.

It brings over a dozen improvements in performance, reliability, correctness and ease of use, including the following major enhancements:

Proactive Spot instance launch on Spot terminations*, reducing the instance replacement time by avoiding the use of temporary On-Demand instances.*
Diversified failover to On-Demand instances during periods of high-demand of EC2 capacity provides even more resilience to Insufficient Capacity Errors(ICE) than the typical AutoScaling groups configured with a single instance type.
Automatically determine the Spot product for each AutoScaling group*, resulting in a simpler setup, correct instance type selection, accurate billing and higher diversification for Windows, RHEL and Suse Linux Spot instances.*
Supporting installation of AutoSpotting in any AWS region as its main region, reducing the complexity and networking costs of the previous cross-region setup.
Fixed a number of issues related to Security group configuration*, which sometimes caused Spot instances to fail to launch or start with incorrect Security Groups.*

This updated version of AutoSpotting is available on the AWS Marketplace and can be installed as usual using CloudFormation or Terraform.

New AutoSpotting release, adding support for Mixed Autoscaling groups

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

How ECS capacity providers inspired me to fix an ancient AutoSpotting issue

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
July 04, 2023

I’m excited to announce that a new version of AutoSpotting is now available.

For some context if you’re not familiar with AutoSpotting, it’s a tool that makes it easy to adopt Spot instances in existing Autoscaling groups, without requiring configuration changes, by replacing their instances with Spot clones using attach/detach API calls.

Vantage just updated ec2instances.info and released all their code, now what?

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed, Vantage recently updated ec2instances.info with a new refreshed look and feel.

Over the weekend I had a deep-dive into their changes and thought about what to do with the cloud-instances.info fork I launched just a few weeks ago.

Why I forked it in the first place?

Weekly Update - 10 Feb 2023

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

GUI progress, outreach to OSS users, github scraper

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
February 10, 2023

Hello, and welcome to another weekly update.

LeanerCloud GUI

This week I continued the development of the new LeanerCloud GUI.

Weekly Update - 27 Jan 2023

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:09:41 +0000

LeanerCloud GUI, Website updates, Infrastructure improvements with Terraform and ChatGPT, Podcast news, Karpenter

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
January 27, 2023

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

LeanerCloud GUI work

Like I mentioned last week, I started the week by working for a couple of days on the new LeanerCloud GUI tool, that would hopefully remove some of the friction of adopting my tools for new users.

How can Arm chips like AWS Graviton or Apple M1/2 be faster and cheaper than x86 chips from Intel or AMD

Wed, 10 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The Arm price/performance paradox

In my cost optimization gigs I often see how many people don’t understand how Arm chips (such as AWS Graviton and Apple M1/M2) can be both cheaper and faster than x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

It’s counter-intuitive, so many think that since Graviton is ~20% cheaper, it must also be slower.

To explain this paradox, imagine two development teams:

Team x86 has 4 engineers and 6 managers
Team Arm has 6 engineers and 2 managers

That’s how you can get 50% more output at 20% less costs.

New AutoSpotting release, adding support for Mixed Autoscaling groups

Wed, 10 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

How ECS capacity providers inspired me to fix an ancient AutoSpotting issue

Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
July 04, 2023

I’m excited to announce that a new version of AutoSpotting is now available.

Progress report for the first week after forking ec2instances.info

Wed, 10 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

It’s been a little more than a week since I decided to fork ec2instances.info as cloud-instances.info, which I announced publicly last Thursday.

Releasing additional Terraform building blocks to the LeanerCloud ONCE bundle

Wed, 10 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Announcing a new release to the LeanerCloud ONCE bundle, which consists of the Terraform serverless microservice building blocks.

The bundle also contains the Optimizer CLI FinOps tool for GP2 to GP3 conversion for EC2 and EDS, and rightsizing with conversion to Graviton for RDS, Elasticache and OpenSearch, released previously.

About Us

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 09:29:16 +1000

Almost 10 Years of AWS Experience

We have been using AWS since 2013, for a wide range of projects, including building and operating websites with millions of monthly active users, and handling several petabytes of data.

Over 7 Years of Cloud Optimization

As of 2015 we started our journey with cost optimization, at first just for the fun of building open source tooling that happens to automate optimization of EC2 instances and later of EBS volumes for up to 90% of cost savings, and later making a business out of it. This tooling is still available free of charge and has been in use at thousands of customers, saving many of them in the tens of millions of dollars so far.

Contact

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:01:34 +0700

Get in Touch

We offer a free consultation for all new clients.

Email: contact@leanercloud.com

Phone: +49 176 8629 4208

Address: Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu Lehderstrasse 32 13086 Berlin, Germany

EBS Optimizer - Lower EBS Costs with Better Performance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

EBS Optimizer

Optimize the EBS volumes attached to your EC2 instances for lower costs, with often better and more predictable performance.

Install from AWS Marketplace Book a Call

How EBS Optimizer works

Each EC2 instance uses at least one EBS volume as its main storage device, much like your computer's drive. There are multiple volume types with different cost and performance characteristics, overlapping to a large degree.