Cloud Costs Optimization

CTO: “Reduce cloud costs now !”
Me: “How much ? When ? What about my OKRs ?”

Sound familiar ? If you nodded & smiled, you are yet another tech leader / senior engineer juggling yet another business goal. Being cost-effective while serving a growing business is hard, and raises multiple questions - especially if you are a platform used by multiple functional teams:
“What do I optimize ? Whom do I make unhappy ? How much time do I spend on cost optimization ?”

Live almost everything else, cost questions too can be addressed via focus on usage & ROI - supported by a mix of tools, analyses, process changes and some code fixes too !

In this brief-ish talk, we’ll look at how these challenges were addressed against our data services & platform:

• by a team of 5 engineers, over a short period of 3 months
• and achieved 30% immediate & sustainable cost savings

(PS: lets’ not forget the lessons learnt - what worked ? what didn’t ?)

slide deck here