Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. It’s been a few years since I caught up with Andreas Wittig, who is also known in the internet as cloudonaut, and much has happened since then. Andreas, how are you?

Andreas: Hey, absolutely. Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here in the show. I’m doing fine.

Corey: So, one thing that I have always held you in some high regard for is that you have done what I have never had the attention span to do: you wrote a book. And you published it a while back through Manning, it was called Amazon Web Services in Action. That is ‘in action’ two words, not Amazon Web Services Inaction of doing absolutely nothing about it, which is what a lot of companies in the space seem to do instead.

Andreas: [laugh]. Yeah, absolutely. So. And it was not only me. I’ve written the book together with my brother because back in 2015, Manning, for some reason, wrote in and asked us if we would be interested in writing the book.

And we had just founded our own consulting company back then and we had—we didn’t have too many clients at the very beginning, so we had a little extra time free. And then we decided, okay, let’s do the book. And let’s write a book about Amazon Web Services, basically, a deep introduction into all things AWS. So, this was 2015, and it was indeed a lot of work, much more [laugh] than we expected. So, first of all, the hard part is, what do you want to have in the book? So, what’s the TOC? What is important and must be in?

And then you start writing and have examples and everything. So, it was really an interesting journey. And doing it together with a publisher like Manning was also really interesting because we learned a lot about writing. You have kind of a coach, an editor that helps you through that process. So, this was really a hard and fun experience.

Corey: There’s a lot of people that have said very good things about writing the book through a traditional publisher. And they also say that one of the challenges is it’s a blessing and a curse, where you basically have someone standing over your shoulder saying, “Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?” The consensus that seems to have emerged from people who have written books is, “That was great, please don’t ever ask me to do it again.”

And my operating theory is that no one wants to write a book. They want to have written a book. Which feels like two very different things most of the time. But the reason you’re back on now is that you have gone the way of the terrible college professor, where you’re going to update the book, and therefore you get to do a whole new run of textbooks and make everyone buy it and kill the used market, et cetera. And you’ve done that twice now because you have just recently released the third edition. So, I have to ask, how different is version one from version two and from version three? Although my apologies; we call them ‘editions’ in the publishing world.

Andreas: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah. So, of course, as you can imagine, things change a lot in AWS world. So, of course, you have to constantly update things. So, I remember from first to second edition, we switched from CloudFormation in JSON to YAML. And now to the third edition, we added two new chapters. This was also important to us, so to keep also the scope of the book in shape.

So, we have in the third edition, two new chapters. One is about automating deployments, recovering code deploy, [unintelligible 00:03:59], CloudFormation rolling updates in there. And then there was one important topic missing at all in the book, which was containers. And we finally decided to add that in, and we have now container chapter, starting with App Runner, which I find quite an interesting service to observe right now, and then our bread and butter service: ECS and Fargate. So, that’s basically the two new chapters. And of course, then reworking all the other chapters is also a lot of work. And so, many things change over time. Cannot imagine [laugh].

Corey: When was the first edition released? Because I believe the second one was released in 2018, which means you’ve been at this for a while.

Andreas: Yeah. So, the first was 2015, the second 2018, three years later, and then we had five years, so now this third edition was released at the beginning of this year, 2023.

Corey: Eh, I think you’re right on schedule. Just March of 2020 lasted three years. That’s fine.

Andreas: Yeah [laugh].

Corey: So, I have to ask, one thing that I’ve always appreciated about AWS is, it feels like with remarkably few exceptions, I can take a blog post written on how to do something with AWS from 2008 and now in 2023, I can go through every step along with that blog post. And yeah, I might have trouble getting some of the versions and services and APIs up and running, but the same steps will absolutely work. There are very few times where a previously working API gets deprecated and stops working. Is this the best way to proceed? Absolutely not.

But you can still spin up the m1.medium instance sizes, or whatever it was, or [unintelligible 00:05:39] on small or whatever the original only size that you could get was. It’s just there are orders of magnitude and efficiency gains you can do by—you can go through by using more modern approaches. So, I have to ask, was there anything in the book as you revised it—two times now—that needed to come out because it was now no longer working?

Andreas: So, related to the APIs that’s—they are really very stable, you’re right about that. So, the problem is, our first few chapters where we have screenshots of how you go through the management—

Corey: Oh no.

Andreas: —console [laugh]. And you can probably, you can redo them every three months, probably, because the button moves or a step is included or something like that. So, the later chapters in the book, where we focus a lot on the CLI or CloudFormation and stuff like—or SDKs, they are pretty stable. But the first few [ones 00:06:29] are a nightmare to update all those screenshots. And then sometimes, so I was going through the book, and then I noticed, oh, there’s a part of this chapter that I can completely remove nowadays.

So, I can give you an example. So, I was going through the chapter about Simple Storage Service S3, and I—there was a whole section in the chapter about read-after-write consistency. Because back then, it was important that you knew that after updating an object or reading an object before it was created the first time, you could get outdated versions for a little while, so this was eventually consistent. But nowadays, AWS has changed that and basically now, S3 has this strong read-after-write consistency. So, I basically could remove that whole part in the chapter which was quite complicated to explain to the reader, right, so I [laugh] put a lot of effort into that.

Corey: You think that was confusing? I look at the sea of systems I had to oversee at one company, specifically to get around that problem. It’s like, well, we can now take this entire application and yeet it into the ocean because it was effectively a borderline service to that just want to ens—making consistency guarantees. It’s not a common use case, but it is one that occurs often enough to be a problem. And of course, when you need it, you really need it. That was a nice under-the-hood change that was just one day, surprise, it works that way. But I’m sure it was years of people are working behind the scenes, solving for impossible problems to get there, and cetera, et cetera.

Andreas: Yeah, yeah. But that’s really cool is to remove parts of the book that are now less complicated. This is really cool. So, a few other examples. So, things change a lot. So, for example, EFS, so we have EFS, Elastic File System, in the book as well. So, now we have new throughput modes, different limits. So, there’s really a lot going on and you have to carefully go through all the—

Corey: Oh, when EFS launched, it was terrible. Now, it’s great just because it’s gotten so much more effective and efficient as a service. It’s… AWS releases things before they’re kind of ready, it feels like sometimes, and then they improve with time. I know there have been feature deprecations. For example, for some reason, they are no longer allowing us to share out a bucket via BitTorrent, which, you know, in 2006 when it came out, seemed like a decent idea to save on bandwidth. But here in 2023, no one cares about it.

But I’m also keeping a running list of full-on AWS services that have been deprecated or have the deprecations announced. Are any of those in the book in any of its editions? And if and when there’s a fourth edition, will some of those services have to come out?

Andreas: [laugh]. Let’s see. So, right after the book was published—because the problem with books is they get printed, right; that’s the issue—but the target of the book, AWS, changes. So, a few weeks after the printed book was out, we found out that we have an issue in our one of our examples because now S3 buckets, when you create them, they have locked public access enabled by default. And this was not the case before. And one of our example relies on that it can create object access control lists, and this is not working now anymore. [laugh].

So yeah, there are things changing. And we have, the cool thing about Manning is they have that what they call a live book, so you can read it online and you can have notes from other readers and us as the authors along the text, and there we can basically point you in the right direction and explain what happened here. So, this is how we try to keep the book updated. Of course, the printed one stays the same, but the ebook can change over time a little bit.

Corey: Yes, ebooks are… at least keeping them updated is a lot easier, I would imagine. It feels like that—speaking of continuous builds and automatic CI/CD approaches—yeah, well, we could build a book just by updating some text in a Git repo or its equivalent, and pressing go, but it turns out that doing a whole new print run takes a little bit more work.

Andreas: Yeah. Because you mentioned the experience of writing a book with a publisher and doing it on your own with self-publishing, so we did both in the past. We have Amazon Web Services in Action with Manning and we did another book, Rapid Docker on AWS in self-publishing. And what we found out is, there’s really a lot of effort that goes into typesetting and layouting a book, making sure it looks consistent.

And of course, you can just transform some markdown into a epub and PDF versions, but if a publisher is doing that, the results are definitely different. So, that was, besides the other help that we got from the publisher, very helpful. So, we enjoyed that as well.

Corey: What is the current state of the art—since I don’t know the answer to this one—around updating ebook versions? If I wind up buying an ebook on Kindle, for example, will they automatically push errata down automatically through their system, or do they reserve that for just, you know, unpublishing books that they realized shouldn’t be on the Marketplace after people have purchased them?

Andreas: [laugh]. So—

Corey: To be fair, that only happened once, but I’m still giving them grief for it a decade and change later. But it was 1984. Of all the books to do that, too. I digress.

Andreas: So, I’m not a hundred percent sure how it works with the Kindle. I know that Manning pushes out new versions by just emailing all the customers who bought the book and sending them a new version. Yeah.

Corey: Yeah. It does feel, on some level, like there needs to be at least a certain degree of substantive change before they’re going to start doing that. It’s like well, good news. There was a typo on page 47 that we’re going to go ahead and fix now. Two letters were transposed in a word. Now, that might theoretically be incredibly important if it’s part of a code example, which yes, send that out, but generally, A, their editing is on point, so I didn’t imagine that would sneak through, and 2, no one cares about a typo release and wants to get spammed over it?

Andreas: Definitely, yeah. Every time there’s a reprint of the book, you have the chance to make small modifications, to add something or remove something. That’s also a way to keep it in shape a little bit.

Corey: I have to ask, since most people talk about AWS services to a certain point of view, what is your take on databases? Are you sticking to the actual database services or are you engaged in my personal hobby of misusing everything as a database by holding it wrong?

Andreas: [laugh]. So, my favorite database for starting out is DynamoDB. So, I really like working with DynamoDB and I like the limitations and the thing that you have to put some thoughts into how to structure your data set in before. But we also use a lot of Aurora, which really find an interesting technology. Unfortunately, Aurora Serverless, it’s not becoming a product that I want to use. So, version one is now outdated, version two is much too expensive and restricted. So—

Corey: I don’t even know that it’s outdated because I’m seeing version one still get feature updates to it. It feels like a divergent service. That is not what I would expect a version one versus version two to be. I’m with you on Dynamo, by the way. I started off using that and it is cheap is free for most workloads I throw at it. It’s just a great service start to finish. The only downside is that if I need to move it somewhere else, then I have a problem.

Andreas: That’s true. Yeah, absolutely.

Corey: I am curious, as far as you look across the sea of change—because you’ve been doing this for a while and when you write a book, there’s nothing that I can imagine that would be better at teaching you the intricacies of something like AWS than writing a book on it. I got a small taste of this years ago when I shot my mouth off and committed to give a talk about Git. Well, time to learn Git. And teaching it to other people really solidifies a lot of the concepts yourself. Do you think that going through the process of writing this book has shaped how you perform as an engineer?

Andreas: Absolutely. So, it’s really interesting. So,I added the third edition and I worked on it mostly last year. And I didn’t expect to learn a lot during that process actually, because I just—okay, I have to update all the examples, make sure everything work, go through the text, make sure everything is up to date. But I learned things, not only new things, but I relearned a lot of things that I wasn’t aware of anymore. Or maybe I’ve never been; I don’t know exactly [laugh].

But it’s always, if you go into the details and try to explain something to others, you learn a lot about that. So, teaching is a very good way to, first of all gather structure and a deep understanding of a topic and also dive into the details. Because when you write a book, every time you write a sentence, ask the question, is that really correct? Do I really know that or do I just assume that? So, I check the documentation, try to find out, is that really the case or is that something that came up myself?

So, you’ll learn a lot by doing that. And always come to the limits of the AWS documentation because sometimes stuff is just not documented and you need to figure out, what is really happening here? What’s the real deal? And then this is basically the research part. So, I always find that interesting. And I learned a lot in during the third edition, while was only adding two new chapters and rewriting a lot of them. So, I didn’t expect that.

Corey: Do you find that there has been an interesting downstream effect from having written the book, that for better or worse, I’ve always no—I always notice myself responding to people who have written a book with more deference, more acknowledgment for the time and effort that it takes. And some books, let’s be clear, are terrible, but I still find myself having that instinctive reaction because they saw something through to be published. Have you noticed it changing other aspects of your career over the past, oh, dear Lord, it would have been almost ten years now.

Andreas: So, I think it helped us a lot with our consulting business, definitely. Because at the very beginning, so back in 2015, at least here in Europe and Germany, AWS was really new in the game. And being the one that has written a book about AWS was really helping… stuff. So, it really helped us a lot for our consulting work. I think now we are into that game of having to update the book [laugh] every few years, to make sure it stays up to date, but I think it really helped us for starting our consulting business.

Corey: And you’ve had a consulting business for a while. And now you have effectively progressed to the next stage of consulting business lifecycle development, which is, it feels like you’re becoming much more of a product company than you were in years past. Is that an accurate perception from the outside or am I misunderstanding something fundamental?

Andreas: You know, absolutely, that’s the case. So, from the very beginning, basically, when we founded our company, so eight years ago now, so we always had to go to do consulting work, but also do product work. And we had a rule of thumb that 20% of our time goes into product development. And we tried a lot of different things. So, we had just a few examples that failed completely.

So, we had a Time [Series 00:17:49] as a Service offering at the very beginning of our journey, which failed completely. And now we have Amazon Timestream, which makes that totally—so now the market is maybe there for that. We tried a lot of things, tried content products, but also as we are coming from the software development world, we always try to build products. And over the years, we took what we learned from consulting, so we learned a lot about, of course, AWS, but also about the market, about the ecosystem. And we always try to bring that into the market and build products out of that.

So nowadays, we really transitioned completely from consulting to a product company, as you said. So, we do not do any consulting anymore with one few exception with one of our [laugh] best or most important clients. But we are now a product company. And we only a two-person company. So, the idea was always how to scale a company without growing the team or hiring a lot of people, and a consulting business is definitely not a good way to do that, so yeah, this was why always invested into products.

And now we have two products in the AWS Marketplace which works very well for us because it allows us to sell worldwide and really easily get a relationship up and running with our customers, and that pay through their AWS bill. So, that’s really helping us a lot. Yeah.

Corey: A few questions on that. At first it always seems to me that writing software or building a product is a lot like real estate in that you’re doing a real estate development—to my understanding since I live in San Francisco and this is a [two exit 00:19:28] town; I still rent here—I found though, that you have to spend a lot of money and effort upfront and you don’t get to start seeing revenue on that for years, which is why the VC model is so popular where you’ll take $20 million, but then in return they want to see massive, outsized returns on that, which—it feels—push an awful lot of perfectly sustainable products into things that are just monstrous.

Andreas: Hmm, yeah. Definitely.

Corey: And to my understanding, you bootstrapped. You didn’t take a bunch of outside money to do this, right?

Andreas: No, no, we have completely bootstrapping and basically paying the bills with our consulting work. So yeah, I can give you one example. So, bucketAV is our solution to scan S3 buckets for malware, and basically, this started as an open-source project. So, this was just a side project we are working on. And we saw that there is some demand for that.

So, people need ways to scan their objects—for example, user uploads—for malware, and we just tried to publish that in the AWS Marketplace to sell it through the Marketplace. And we don’t really expect that this is a huge deal, and so we just did, I don’t know, Michael spent a few days to make sure it’s possible to publish that and get in shape. And over time, this really grew into an important, really substantial part of our business. And this doesn’t happen overnight. So, this adds up, month by month. And you get feedback from customers, you improve the product based on that. And now this is one of the two main products that we sell in the Marketplace.

Corey: I wanted to ask you about the Marketplace as well. Are you finding that that has been useful for you—obviously, as a procurement vehicle, it means no matter what country a customer is in, they can purchase it, it shows up on the AWS bill, and life goes on—but are you finding that it has been an effective way to find new customers?

Andreas: Yes. So, I definitely would think so. It’s always funny. So, we have completely inbound sales funnel. So, all customers find us through was searching the Marketplace or Google, probably. And so, what I didn’t expect that it’s possible to sell a B2B product that way. So, we don’t know most of our customers. So, we know their name, we know the company name, but we don’t know anyone there. We don’t know the person who buys the product.

This is, on the one side, a very interesting thing as a two-person company. You cannot build a huge sales process and I cannot invest too much time into the sales process or procurement process, so this really helps us a lot. The downside of it is a little bit that we don’t have a close relationship with our customers and sometimes it’s a little tricky for us to find important person to talk to, to get feedback and stuff. But on the other hand, yeah, it really helps us to sell to businesses all over the world. And we sell to very small business of course, but also to large enterprise customers. And they are fine with that process as well. And I think, even the large enterprises, they enjoy that it’s so easy [laugh] to get a solution up and running and don’t have to talk to any salespersons. So, enjoy it and I think our customers do as well.

Corey: This is honestly the first time I’ve ever heard a verifiable account a vendor saying, “Yeah, we put this thing on the Marketplace, and people we’ve never talked to find us on the Marketplace and go ahead and buy.” That is not the common experience, let’s put it that way. Now true, an awful lot of folks are selling enterprise software on this and someone—I forget who—many years ago had a great blog post on why no enterprise software costs $5,000. It either is going to cost $500 or it’s going to cost 100 grand and up because the difference is, is at some point, you’d have a full-court press enterprise sales motion to go and sell the thing. And below a certain point, great, people are just going to be able to put it on their credit card and that’s fine. But that’s why you have this giant valley of there is very little stuff priced in that sweet spot.

Andreas: Yeah. So, I think maybe it’s important to mention that our products are relatively simple. So, they are just for a very small niche, a solution for a small problem. So, I think that helps a lot. So, we’re not selling a full-blown cloud security solution; we only focus on that very small part: scanning S3 objects for malware.

For example, on marbot,f the other product that we sell, which is monitoring of AWS accounts. Again, we focus on a very simple way to monitor AWS workloads. And so, I think that is probably why this is a successful way for us to find new customers because it’s not a very complicated product where you have to explain a lot. So, that’s probably the differentiator here.

Corey: Having spent a fair bit of time doing battle with compliance goblins—which is, to be clear, I’m not describing people; I’m describing processes—in many cases, we had to do bucket scanning for antivirus, just to check a compliance box. From our position, there was remarkably little risk of a user-generated picture of a receipt that is input sanitized to make sure it is in fact a picture, landing in an S3 bucket and then somehow infecting one of the Linux servers through which it passed. So, we needed something that just checked the compliance box or we would not be getting the gold seal on our website today. And it was, more or less, a box-check as opposed to something that solved a legitimate problem. This was also a decade and change ago. Has that changed to a point now where there are legitimate threats and concerns around this, or is it still primarily just around make the auditor stop yelling at me, please?

Andreas: Mmm. I think it’s definitely to tick the checkbox, to be compliant with this, some regulation. On the other side, I think there are definitely use cases where it makes a lot of sense, especially when it comes to user-generated content of all kinds, especially if you’re not only consuming it internally, but maybe also others can immediately start downloading that. So, that is where we see many of our customers are coming with that scenario that they want to make sure that the files that people upload and others can download are not infected. So, that is probably the most important use case.

Corey: There’s also, on some level, an increasing threat of ransomware. And for a long time, I was very down on the ideas of all these products that hit the market to defend S3 buckets against ransomware. Until one day, there was an AWS security blog post talking about how they found it. And yeah, we’ve we have seen this in the wild; it is causing problems for companies; here’s what to do about it. Because it’s one of those areas where I can’t trust a vendor who’s trying to sell me something to tell me that this problem exists.

I mean, not to cast aspersions, but they’re very interested, they’re very incentivized to tell that story, whereas AWS is not necessarily incentivized to tell a story like that. So, that really brought it home for me that no, this is a real thing. So, I just want to be clear that my opinion on these things does in fact, evolve. It’s not, “Well, I thought it was dumb back in 2012, so clearly it’s still dumb now.” That is not my position, I want to be very clear on that.

I do want to revisit for a moment, the idea of going from a consultancy that is a services business over to a product business because we’ve toyed with aspects of that here at The Duckbill Group a fair bit. We’ve not really found long-term retainer services engagements that add value that we are comfortable selling. And that means as a result that when you sell fixed duration engagements, it’s always a sell, sell, sell, where’s the next project coming from? Whereas with product businesses, it’s oh, the grass is always greener on the other side. It’s recurring revenue. Someone clicks, the revenue sticks around and never really goes away. That’s the dream from where I sit on the services side of the fence, wistfully looking across and wondering what if. Now that you’ve made that transition, what sucks about product businesses that you might not have seen going into it?

Andreas: [laugh]. Yeah, that a good question. So, on the one side, it was really also our dream to have a product business because it really changes the way we work. We can block large parts of our calendar to do deep-focus work, focus on things, find new solutions, and really try to make a solution that really fits to problem and uses all the AWS capabilities to do so. And on the other side, a product business involves, of course, selling the product, which is hard.

And we are two software engineers, [laugh] and really making sure that we optimize our sales and there’s search engine optimization, all that stuff, this is really hard for us because we don’t know anything about that and we always have to find an expert, or we need to build a knowledge ourself, try things out, and so on. So, that whole part of selling the product, this is really a challenge for us. And then of course, product business evolves a lot of support work. So, we get support emails multiple times per hour, and we have to answer them and be as fast as possible with that. So, that is, of course, something that you do not have to do with consulting work.

And not always that, the questions are many times really simple questions that pointed people in the right direction, find part of the documentation that answers the question. So, that is a constant stream of questions coming in that you have to answer. So, the inbox is always full [laugh]. So, that is maybe a small downside of a product business. But other than that, yeah, compared to a consulting business, it really gives us many flexibilities with planning our work day around the rest of our lives. That’s really what we enjoy about a product company.

Corey: I was very careful to pick an expensive problem that was only a business-hours problem. So, I don’t wind up with a surprise, middle-of-the-night panic phone call. It’s yeah, it turns out that AWS billing operate during business hours in the US Pacific Time. The end. And there are no emergencies here; there are simply curiosities that will, in the fullness of time take weeks to get resolved.

Andreas: Mmm. Yeah.

Corey: I spent too many years on call, in that sense. Everyone who’s built a product company the first time always says the second time, the engineering? Meh, there are ways to solve that. Solving the distribution problem. That’s the thing I want to focus on next.

And I feel like I sort of went into this backwards in that I don’t really have a product to sell people but I somehow built an audience. And to be honest, it’s partly why. It’s because I didn’t know what I was going to be doing after 18 months and I knew that whatever it was going to be, I needed an audience to tell about it, so may as well start the work of building the audience now. So, I have to imagine if nothing else, your book has been a tremendous source of building a community. When I mentioned the word cloudonaut to people who have been learning AWS, more often than not, they know who you are.

Andreas: Yeah.

Corey: Although I admit they sometimes get you confused with your brother.

Andreas: [laugh]. Yes, that’s not too hard. Yeah, yeah, cloudonaut is definitely—this was always our, also a side project of we was just writing about things that we learned about AWS. Whenever we, I don’t know, for example, looked into a new series, we wrote a blog post about that. Later, we did start a podcast and YouTube videos during the pandemic, of course, as everyone did. And so, I think this was always fun stuff to do. And we like sharing what we learn and getting into discussion with the community, so this is what we still do and enjoy as well, of course. Yeah.

Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to catch up and see what you’ve been up to these last few years with a labor of love and the pivot to a product company. If people want to learn more, where’s the best place for them to find you?

Andreas: So definitely, the best place to find me is cloudonaut.io. So, this basically points you to all [laugh] what I do. Yeah, that’s basically the one domain and URL that you need to know.

Corey: Excellent. And we will put that in the show notes, of course. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

Andreas: Yeah, it was a pleasure to be back here. I’m big fan of podcasts and also of Screaming in the Cloud, of course, so it was a pleasure to be here again.

Corey: [laugh]. You are always welcome. Andreas Wittig, co-author of Amazon Web Services in Action, now up to its third edition. And of course, the voice behind cloudonaut. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will at one point be able to get to just as soon as I find something to deal with your sarcasm on the AWS Marketplace.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.