Title: FinOps Drama and the Cost of Cloud Dreams

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January 2024 was a month that felt like a whirlwind of tech trends colliding head-on with everyday reality. As I sat at my desk on January 22nd, staring at yet another email about our cloud bill skyrocketing (again), I couldn’t help but think back to the beginning of the year when all we were talking about was AI and LLMs. Now, it felt like FinOps had become the new buzzword, or rather, the pain point.

Let’s start with a quick anecdote: last week, I spent two days arguing with our finance team about why $20K on cloud costs for a single month wasn’t justifiable. It’s not that we were running a POC gone wrong—no, it was a fully baked production system, meticulously architected and optimized. Yet, the cost still climbed like a runaway train.

The Cloud Cost Conundrum

We’re in the throes of DORA metrics now, which means every piece of code deployed is scrutinized not just on its functionality but also on its financial impact. It’s a stark reminder that while cloud platforms offer immense power, they also come with heavy price tags if you don’t manage them right.

In our case, it was a perfect storm: a combination of unused resources left running for the “just-in-case” scenario (yes, I know, guilty as charged), inefficient use of autoscaling, and over-provisioned VMs. The good news is that we’ve since taken steps to address these issues, but the bad news? It’s going to take months of diligent effort and some pretty painful budget cuts.

Platform Engineering and FinOps

This brings me to platform engineering, which has become mainstream in a very real sense. Every team now understands they need their own managed Kubernetes clusters or serverless functions, and with that comes an understanding of the associated costs. The CNCF landscape is overwhelming, but at least there’s more visibility into what we’re paying for.

One recent project I led involved migrating some legacy systems to a containerized environment using Anthos. It was a massive undertaking, especially given the finicky nature of our existing architecture. We had to walk this tightrope between performance and cost optimization. The DevOps team worked tirelessly to ensure that every pod was as lean as possible, but even with all their effort, the cloud bill still went up.

WebAssembly on Server

Speaking of optimizations, one thing that’s been on my radar is WebAssembly (Wasm) on the server side. I’ve been reading a lot about how it can help reduce costs and improve performance by running native code in browsers. However, it’s not without its challenges: dealing with binary compatibility issues, ensuring security, and making sure our CI/CD pipelines are set up to handle Wasm modules.

We’re still in the early stages of exploring this space, but I’m excited about the potential savings. Who knows, maybe next year we won’t be fighting budget battles so hard.

Developer Experience

Lastly, developer experience (DX) has become a real discipline. Every tool we use is now subjected to rigorous DX tests: how easy is it to set up? How intuitive is the API? Can developers integrate it seamlessly into their workflows?

I recently argued with the team over adopting a new CI/CD platform. The old one was clunky and slow, but the new one had a steeper learning curve and required more setup time. In the end, we went with something in between—something that offered good performance while being user-friendly enough for our engineers.

Wrapping Up

As I sit here reflecting on this month, it feels like the tech industry is going through another phase shift. We’re not just building amazing things anymore; we’re also figuring out how to build them sustainably and efficiently. The FinOps drama might be a bit of a drag, but it’s pushing us in the right direction.

Stay tuned for more adventures in platform engineering, cost optimization, and DX. Until next time!

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This month was about navigating the reality of tech costs while striving for innovation and efficiency. It’s been a rollercoaster, to say the least, but that’s what keeps things interesting!