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> "Directed to reduce" Cloud spending. That feels like it should be 100%. An engineer should be as aware of their $ costs as they are their CPU load, filesyst
by buro9 4y ago
> "Directed to reduce" Cloud spending.
That feels like it should be 100%.
An engineer should be as aware of their $ costs as they are their CPU load, filesystem I/O, or memory usage. An engineer should know how many instances they scaled to, and when they're going to scale down.
In fact, the $ cost should be calculable (to a reasonable indicative amount by napkin math - precision not necessary) according to the factors the engineer knows.
Not being aware of the costs feels irresponsible on the part of the engineer. There was a time when we had finite capacity (a single server) and perhaps the engineer had to care less about the cost then (but perhaps they should've cared about utilisation by some measure even then)... but now we're in an age of your application being able to scale beyond reasonable bounds of your companies purse strings, a solid understanding of what your application costs is an essential and core skill. If this is not the game you wanted to play, stay on a VPS or VM.
Anyone possessing a solid understanding will also be looking to reduce or halt their spending... hence, I am surprised the number in the headline is not higher, even ignoring the macro-economic picture.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoThis also means engineers need to be given the means to do so. From my experience, most engineers are not given the very basics to change things, observe important metrics and metric changes, and take the time to formulate a strategy. In theory most places are running with slack. In practice they run under capacity, and engineers aren't going to worry about things out of their control.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThe good thing about spending $20k a month on cloud is they will happily take your money, and make it easy to do so, whereas spending the same on a dev means hiring them first which is a bit of a hassle.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoBeyond ridiculous once you leave SV, by the way. Being difficult about dev salaries but no problem spending 1-10x that on cloud services because one CBA to give their devs time to research costs and metrics.. and then complain why there are so few specialists. The lack of introspection is palpable.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThere is definitely ego. How could I possibly pay a human a million a year? Give it to a corp… no problemo! Reminds me when I worked for a company. Tight with raises but spending half a junior dev salary on some monthly service they never used. And a couple of dev salaries per year on the company party!
- diceduckmonk 4y ago> That feels like it should be 100%. It’s a matter of priority. During periods of revenue or user growth, reducing infrastructure cost may be a premature optimization. Now may be a time to focus on operational and logistical inefficiencies
- buro9 4y agoWhilst I high level agree, I also high level disagree. Even during hyper growth you should be aware of your costs, because you should have an idea of your margin. I'm not sure any engineer that has awareness of costs, CPU, memory, storage, network, etc... is not trying to reduce some of it - even during hyper growth.
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoThe question was whether the C-suite is telling them to reduce costs, not whether they are doing anything to reduce costs.
- phpisthebest 4y agoI have been in system administration for over 20 years... Cloud or OnPrem I have never once has a dev ask about the cost to deploy their new thing, software, etc Never once has a dev asked about storage costs, of the differences in storing a file in a filesystem vs a blob in a database, Never once ask about mem optimization could reduce infrastructure costs never once