Erik Peterson, founder and CTO at CloudZero, recently interviewed John-Cade “JC” Griffin to discuss how the CloudZero platform has influenced aspects of cloud financial management — such as engineering-led optimization — within his company.
Some fascinating nuggets of wisdom emerged from the conversation — everything from how to answer those tricky cost questions every SaaS company struggles with to how to encourage engineers to start building with cost efficiency in mind. If you’re facing similar issues in your own company, stay tuned!
Watch the full video, or skim the highlights below, and come back when you have time to dive into the details.
How JC’s Team Makes Cost-Informed Business Decisions With Data From CloudZero
Every SaaS company leader wants to understand their cloud finances. But most people don’t know how or where to begin. As a result, all too often that desire gets swept under the rug.
As a company leader, JC found that his unique experiences as a software engineer fueled his drive to not accept the status quo. He wanted to go deeper into the problem and truly understand the drivers of his company’s cloud costs.
In his opinion, cloud finance isn’t just a problem for the executive suite and the finance department; engineers have their own part to play.
It was this mindset that originally drew him to sign up for CloudZero. Once he got that ball rolling, a number of interesting things began to happen.
1. JC was able to answer the burning questions almost every SaaS leader wants to ask
JC credits his engineering mindset as the motivation behind wanting to answer the difficult questions most SaaS leaders have no idea how to address. He wanted to know:
“How does application code impact the costs and usage of infrastructure? How do architectural decisions drive — up or down — cloud costs?”
Plenty of SaaS engineers wonder how their actions affect the company’s bottom line. But without the right solution to measure individual resource costs, most engineers aren’t able to adequately answer these questions.
When JC’s team began tracking individual cloud costs and the resources that contributed to those costs, suddenly the answers to the above questions became clear. Once the team knew how their infrastructure and build decisions impacted costs, they started making those decisions more mindfully.
That’s one of the reasons CloudZero is so powerful; it provides the platform to measure cloud costs, so engineers can optimize their code and make smarter build decisions the way they naturally want to.
2. His engineers began to take charge of their cloud spend
(Highlight clip #3 and #5. Probably, you could place one above the header and one below the header)
Speaking of engineers naturally wanting to optimize every decision — a wonderful thing happens when you put cloud cost data in front of the engineers responsible for those costs: They start to alter their build decisions without you even having to ask.
“I believe engineers want and crave information,” JC says.
“Ultimately, equipping engineers with the information they need to do their jobs and to make decisions enhances their ability to succeed.”
This is important because engineers care deeply about efficiency. So when you give them the means to pursue cost efficiency, they tend to do so happily.
3. As a natural result of this culture shift, cost became a major driver of business decisions
When SaaS businesses operate on prem — or when they don’t closely track their cloud costs with a platform such as CloudZero — business decisions tend to be disconnected from the budget.
Finance may take a look at the cloud bill and make a note that Engineering went above or below budget for that month, but there’s not much the engineers can do about it for next month without knowing exactly where the costs came from.
In the cloud, JC says, cost data is crucial.
“It drives the business case for architectural decisions, whereas before, that wasn’t present and we couldn’t do that to the same degree.”
Tracking costs in real time with CloudZero enabled JC’s team to start taking cost into consideration before major build decisions are made—and before it’s too late to bring each month’s cloud bill under-budget.
Ready To Spark Your Own Culture Shift Toward Engineering-Led Optimization?
The best part about many of the positive results JC experienced in his company is that they occurred almost effortlessly as a result of partnering with CloudZero.
When you adopt CloudZero in your own company and begin to see the data rolling in, your team will have the same ability to start making smarter business decisions and operating with cost efficiency in mind.
to see the platform in action.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
