Episode 15 - Cost Control in the Cloud

Cost Control in the Cloud

Episode 15: Show Notes

Welcome back to Cloud Out Loud! As we record this at the start of July, there are lots of interesting doldrums occuring in all sectors of life. Particularly, the tech industry is being challenged. We are in the middle of a lot of lay-offs, and we are seeing a plummet in the success of startups that were thriving at the start of last year. As engineers, we’re able to identify things you could have done to limit this, and things you can implement today with the systems you are currently running in the cloud. During today’s episode, we discuss two approaches to help you to regain control of your costs. The first of these involves designing new systems that support cost control, and the second part of our conversation covers how to work with the ones we already have in place. 

Key Points From This Episode:

• The plummet we are seeing in tech startup success in July 2022.
• What we are discussing today: cost control from an engineer’s perspective.
• Two approaches including designing systems and working with the ones we have in place.
• The opportunity you have to save money through using managed services.
• How costs can run out of control by leaving managed services online.
• Why there is a variety of opinions on cost transparency.
• The engineer’s tendency to solve problems without cost considerations if they are not provided.
• How organizational policies can create guardrails around costing.
• Why it is important to turn off access to regions that you don’t use for every Cloud provider.
• When to make exceptions to the guardrails you put in place.
• What happens when neither of our initial two recommendations are effective.
• Managed services and how they can facilitate running things on demand.
• Having monitoring around API calling and API call throttling to reveal hidden costs.
• A hard and fast rule: if you are consuming a service on a per call basis, you are monitoring the quantity of API calls you are making.
• Why it is so essential to flag that something anomalous has happened that you need to react to immediately.
• Logan’s final thought: when you are picking a managed service, really look at how you will be using it in your architecture.
• The opportunities that often exist to spend less money on a service if you don’t need its full power.
  
  Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
  
  Jon Gallagher on LinkedIn
  Logan Gallagher on LinkedIn
  
  Corey Quinn - The Essential Gadfly of the Cloud and Cloud Costs
  
  AWS - Cost Management Guidelines
  Google Cloud - Cost Management Guidelines
  Azure - Cost Management Guidelines
  
  FinOps - What is FinOps