Two quick hacks I learned today while doing some general “tech life” maintenance.

Amazon Web Services – Saving Money

The first “hack” is an easy one that I am now kicking myself in my own ass for not picking upon 6 months ago.    This is a $600 oversight that is a LOT of beers-worth of savings.   The trick is simple…  RESERVE INSTANCES.    Especially with RDS.

It turns out that for RDS (and possibly EC2 and other instance types) you can “purchase” a No Upfront Costs reserved instance.   The cost?   FREE.     The savings can be substantial.  For an M4.Large size instance it can be as much as $80/month!

I have been running a M4.Large sized RDS instances for months.    The hourly rate is $0.350.    That runs $3066 per year or about $255/month.

By purchasing a reserved M4.Large instance for 1 year with no upfront fee the rate drops to $0.241/hour or $2,111 annually.   That is $175/month.    A quick $80 for clicking a few buttons and pressing submit.

In my case I opted for the partial up front payment.   In this case you pay $648 today as a one-time charge for that M4.Large reservation for 1 year.     The hourly rate drops to $0.132/hour , $1,156/year or about $150/month.    That is $105 less than what I was paying.  Sweet!

gSuite Email Forwarding

I have been using gSuite / Google for Work / Google for Business or whatever other of a half-dozen names they’ve used in the past 10 years for… well … about 10 years now.     One of the key features I use regularly is the email routing which allows a single domain-wide email address to be forwarded to both in-company gSuite and non-Google users (such as Yahoo! email addresses).     It makes it easy to give customers (or my son’s tennis team) a single short email address that goes to multiple people.

It turns out that the forwarding rules can be written as regular expressions.  Add a gSuite email route for skunkworks@yourdomain.com and set recipients to a half-dozen different email addresses and anyone that sends email to skunkworks@ will get broadcast to the team.

It turns out that the regular expressions allow you to do some pretty cool things like send email coming in to skunkworks@(yourdomain|mydomain).com to hit that same group of people whether  the person sends to yourdomain.com or mydomain.com on the email.

Pretty cool.

But … this system happens to break a common tenant of nearly every major email system in existence.  It is CASE SENSITIVE.

What?!?!

Yup.   Email to Skunkworks@ will NOT go anywhere and the user will get an “undeliverable” message for everyone not on the Google family of services.

Well it turns out a simple hack can fix that.    add ^(?i) at the start of the expression to make it case insensitive.