Rootconf Mini 2024 (on 22nd & 23rd Nov)

Optimizing cloud costs isn’t just about deploying tools and applying technical best practices—it’s fundamentally tied to a shift in organizational culture, a strategic and deep understanding of latest technology, and the identification of both quick wins and long-term investment areas.

In this session, through the lens of what transpired in Sharechat, a startup that has every-thing going for it, billion $ plus investments, 50% week-over-week user growth and which quickly became one of GCP’s largest APAC (Asia-pacific) cloud deployments, we will go over the key insights learnt in undertaking this massive cost reduction journey where we reduced cloud infrastructure costs from an ARR of 150M USD to < 25M fraught with very interesting organizational , cultural and hugely complex technical challenges.

Key Takeaways

• When scale hits, cloud cost burns. Through this talk, I will share insights on how to avoid/mitigate this. Adopting cultural changes in your organization is critical to create long term sustainability for cloud costs. Specifically I will deep dive into

  • Balancing between growth/product initiatives vs optimization and aligning business leaders
  • Fostering a culture of ownership, accountability and incentivization amongst engineers.
  • Design cost controls so that cost doesnt claw back.

• As companies focus on trying to achieve PMF, a lot of bad Design and Architectural decisions get taken which gets exposed when scale increases. In this session I will share insights around the following aspects to help you arrive at the right decisions.

  • Cloud pitfalls to avoid
  • Technologies that are hard to get right and require heavy investment.
  • Optimization areas where there are quick ROI
  • Adopting evolutionary architectures

Audience

• Engineering Leaders: Captains who can take-back insights from this talk and get to apply in their ever-growing ship.
• Cloud Architects and Engineers: Individuals who are responsible for designing, and managing cloud-based infrastructure and applications.