Book Review: Mastering AWS Cost Optimization

I dabble in AWS every now and again :) and a new book just came out - so obviously I wanted to go through it and give it a read.

Mastering AWS Cost Optimization: Real-world technical and operational cost-saving best practices
(Eli Mansoor and Yair Green)

So first some disclosure - I have met with Eli a few times throughout my career - we had some business discussions during his Rackspace days. Eli Reached out to me and asked me to read the book and post a review.

I received a free paperback copy.

I finished the book in two days, (it was chag and I had a lot of time to read). It quite clear that a lot of knowledge and detail went into the writing of the book. 

Eli and Yair took a methodological approach throughout the book. They focused on three main aspects of your AWS cost (with a strong emphasis on Compute and Storage, but also Networking).

They used a methodology which they name KAO (Knowledge, Architecture, Operation) which in my honest opinion provided a logical and clear flow for the book and made it an easy read. 

They go into detail on how each of the services are used - sometimes in really great detail. There are a number of examples in the book used to explain how things exactly work. 

The last section of the book is focused on Operations with different suggestions and recommendations on how to adjust you current practices, to become more “cost aware/optimized”. I for one would have preferred that this section would have been more of the focus of the entire book - but that could just be me. There are a great number of gems in this section - that has something new for everyone (me included!!)  

As I said, this was an easy read, well structured and very informative. Eli and Yair have done a great job, diving deep on a topic that is important to us all (but has no real good source of information - besides experience) - but have also left enough space to expand on this book and to provide a more detailed deep dive and focus on more specific subjects in the future.

I would definitely give it a read!