Best of FinOps — November 2025

1. 1
   Article

   Hacker News·28w

   Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea

   A developer shares their experience moving projects from AWS to bare-metal servers with Hetzner, achieving 10x cost savings and 2x performance improvement. The piece argues that cloud services like AWS charge excessive markups (10x-100x) compared to renting or buying servers directly, and that most small-to-medium businesses don't need expensive managed cloud services. It challenges common fears about server management, suggesting that with modern tools like AI assistants, managing Linux servers is accessible and cost-effective for most developers.

   93

   18
2. 2
   Article

   The Last Week in AWS·24w

   AWS Finally Lets You Find Your Idle NAT Gateways

   AWS Compute Optimizer now identifies idle NAT Gateways, helping users eliminate unnecessary costs. Each idle gateway costs approximately $35/month plus data processing fees. A NAT Gateway is considered idle when it has no active connections, no incoming packets from VPC clients or destinations for 32 days, and isn't associated with a route table. This feature addresses the low-end cost problem of forgotten resources, though high-volume data processing charges remain a separate concern.

   12
3. 3
   Article

   Jobs·28w

   The Day Our Database Bill Nearly Sank the Company

   A SaaS startup reduced their database costs by 60% through systematic optimization. The team identified missing indexes causing full-table scans on 50M+ row tables, removed unused indexes, archived old logs to S3, and refactored queries. Results included 5x faster queries, 40% lower CPU load, and 50% storage cost reduction. The key takeaway emphasizes database optimization as an ongoing practice requiring regular monitoring of queries, maintaining lean indexes, and proper data lifecycle management.

   11

   2