Duckbill

“Thank you for the support over the last 6 months – we could not have made such a positive outcome happen for our company without all of your expertise and guidance. I’ve already referred a few large customers your way. You also got a shout out during our C-suite and board approval process, so who knows who else might reach out.”

““The most helpful part was having access to Duckbill as experts to answer questions about AWS infrastructure (such as Cloudwatch and Redshift). Things that will set us up to build infrastructure that will scale better with respect to cost over time.””

““We had very open communication, very direct. It was really more like having an extended team working together. It never felt like, ‘Oh, you are the external consultancy and you’ll lecture us at the end of the two weeks about what we did wrong,’ . Duckbill was very solution-oriented. Everybody liked working with them.”

““When Duckbill’s report said we’d save millions of dollars annually everyone could see this would be a big win.””

“Duckbill was a fantastic partner for us to work with. During our engagement, we were able to quickly identify a number of areas where we could reduce costs, without significant effort. We were truly surprised how quickly they were able to assess our architecture and configuration simply by walking through our AWS bills.”

““We didn’t have to explain anything about any of the services. They already knew everything about them. It was just a case of, ‘Hey, why are you using this? Have you considered this instead? Are there any blockers here?””

“If, for example, you present an engineer or engineering lead with a choice of the myriad ways in which containers can be deployed in AWS, they may not have a full appreciation of why you would choose one of the other, not just in the raw cost impacts of each but also the labor impacts of scaling and managing each one. With Duckbill, it’s like we’re timesharing an AWS Architect. They’ve got that experience to tell us the cost impacts—including the undocumented costs—and why we should choose one over the other.”

“One of the main benefits we’re going to see from our continued work with Duckbill is the savings on our labor expenses. Like most companies, we have multi-million dollar infrastructure expenditures, but our labor expenditures are at least five times as expensive. The time savings is the big number we’re optimizing for and having access to experts with a deep knowledge of the architecture to prevent us from doing something wrong helps us do that.”

“As part of the cost modelling, Duckbill came up with a meaningful unit economic KPI for us to use: cost per thousand document views. It’s helped bridge the gap between how Finance perceives what we’re doing and how Engineering and Product perceives it. Finance can tie that metric to their annualized budget, while I can come from the other direction to identify how infrastructure changes we plan to make will impact that number. It just gives us a meeting place in the middle as we talk about costs.”

“We’re keeping Duckbill on retainer for our migration and it’s going to continue to pay dividends. As we move forward with the migration and have to make architectural changes for some of our applications, we have someone more experienced that we trust to go to with questions when we’re not sure if we’re missing something.  Having them confirm “yes, that’s how you have to do it” or “no, you don’t want to use that service because of these hidden costs”, it gives us tremendously valuable confidence and moral support.”

“We’re now ready to proceed with the migration and feel confident that we’ve gotten it right. Without Duckbill’s involvement, we would not have been able to get to this point, certainly not this year. That has a huge monetary impact on us.”

“Having access to Duckbill to ask questions about AWS infrastructure saved us time by helping us avoid running down dead ends.  With a small technical team and limited resources to support our data pipeline, anytime that we can save time, that’s the biggest benefit for us because it’s all about opportunity costs.”

“Duckbill gave us recommendations on specific changes that we can make to control our AWS costs, identifying 20-27% in savings.”

“Our AWS bill is a significant cost line item for us.  As the scale of our data grows, we need to make sure we’re scaling our technical systems along with it and that we’re doing it in a cost effective way.  Duckbill came recommended to us and it seemed like a good opportunity to get some expert advice on the issue.”

“I certainly would recommend that others work with Duckbill. They are experts in AWS and there’s no question that they are able to help reduce costs.”

“They were very easy to communicate with. We had access to them directly in our Slack to send them quick messages asking questions about our AWS infrastructure. For our calls, they were extremely accommodating of the pretty broad set of times zones we’re spread out across. They took meetings at bizarre times of the morning for them on the West Coast, so we really appreciated their flexibility.”

“The most helpful part was having access to Duckbill Group as experts to answer questions about AWS infrastructure (such as Cloudwatch and Redshift). Things that may or may not help with saving money exactly, but will set us up to build infrastructure that will scale better with respect to cost over time.”

“As a result of the cost-optimization work we did with Duckbill, we reduced our AWS bill by 25%—immediately,” Lange said. “While we could have done this on our own, it would have taken much longer and we would have wasted a lot of cash along the way.”

“We had very open communication, very direct,” Lange said. “It was really more like having an extended team working together. It never felt like, ‘Oh, you are the external consultancy and you’ll lecture us at the end of the two weeks about what we did wrong,’” he said. “Duckbill was very solution-oriented. Everybody liked working with them.”

““A hundred percent. Even now, having experienced an AWS negotiation, if you were to throw another few hundred million dollar deal in front of me, I would still call Duckbill ,” he said.”

““At no point were we talking about what Duckbill charged… it was so far in the rearview mirror. We could stay focused on the project and not on the negotiation price.””

““Three or four little things Duckbill spotted easily paid for the cost of bringing in a third party. I can’t see us finding any of those smaller details if we were running the negotiation on our own,” he said.”

““Duckbill could say, ‘Hey, we’ve done this before. It’s a waste of your time to negotiate on such and such component, because AWS won’t budge in this case.’ Okay, great. That just saved us 10 hours.””

““We wouldn’t have known about those without Duckbill,” the client said.”

““We had very high spend on some different services that we leveraged. That’s how it became so detailed—we negotiated each of those different things separately.””