Many SaaS companies struggle to get engineers to take charge of costs and lower cloud expenses.
Confused business leaders often put the problem on the shoulders of the engineers: Surely, it’s just that the engineers don’t care enough to stay within budget, or maybe they just don’t want to participate in the culture of cost efficiency leadership is trying to build.
But what if your engineers actually do want to optimize costs—they just don’t have the tools and data to do so?
Erik Peterson, our CTO and Founder here at CloudZero, interviewed Vitor Pellegrino, Site Reliability Engineer and FinOps specialist at Duolingo, to talk about this scenario. It turns out that Duolingo’s engineers actually cared very much about their cost contributions. But it wasn’t until Duolingo found CloudZero that the engineers were able to fully control their costs.
View the full video here or check out the highlights below.
How CloudZero Empowered Duolingo Engineers To Control Cloud Spending
Duolingo engineers were fascinated to learn how their decisions affected cloud costs
When you’re an engineer operating without in-depth cost data, sticking to a budget can seem like taking shots in the dark. You might make a good choice or a bad one, and there’s no reliable way to tell until next month’s bill comes in.
“I like to ask, ‘How much does Service X cost as a percentage of our total costs?’ And I get varied responses,” Vitor says. “[When people see] the proper data, I always get some surprised reactions.”
Vitor finds that these folks are then motivated to log into their systems, take a closer look at other services they’re working on, and start paying attention to costs. They’re not forced to take costs into account; they want to.
Cost data gave the engineers a foundation to inform their future decisions
Duolingo already had a culture of accountability, but a crucial piece of the puzzle was missing.
Vitor explains, “People were trying to do things [to improve cost control], but they didn’t have the right data to base their decisions on. So there were a few situations where people assumed their services were costing a certain amount, but [the estimate] wasn’t actually close.”
Getting the full picture from CloudZero made a huge difference for Duolingo’s engineering team. “When they looked at the data, they were able to say ‘Actually, that’s not the best investment of our time.’” They could focus their efforts elsewhere or try to make improvements to infrastructure until costs were brought in line with the budget.
Vitor’s engineers worked to improve the customer experience while using costs as a natural guideline
Once Duolingo leaders saw that engineers were interested in making cost improvements, they began rolling cost conversations into meetings about other factors, such as user experience and software efficiency.
This enabled the engineering team to get a holistic view of how their products were performing and to make adjustments with the big picture in mind.
Because the engineers were so motivated to make positive strides, the cost insights they gained from CloudZero indirectly translated to a better user experience for their customers.
Cost data became a driving force behind innovation, rather than a roadblock.
One reason companies sometimes hesitate to ask engineers to take accountability for costs is because there’s an assumption that if engineers are worrying about costs, they won’t be as focused on their primary work.
Erik puts it succinctly: “I sometimes hear from folks, ‘If I let my engineers start thinking about costs, they’re going to slow down. They’re not going to innovate as quickly as I would like them to, and they’re going to stop pushing out features as quickly. Was that your experience?”
Vitor answers, “In fact, no. We’re seeing that people, when they get the information, that’s like a healthy [boundary]. They stay inside these boundaries.” He suspects this allows engineers to know when they’re doing a good job, which reinforces their decisions and provides motivation to continue.
Having access to comprehensive cost data also gives engineers the opportunity to make improvements where they see fit, without bogging them down by giving them a budget they don’t have the means to follow.
They choose to strive for cost efficiency, and so they naturally innovate.
Ready To Give Your Engineers The Tools And Data They Need To Take Control Of Costs?
Presenting your team with hard data is one of the most impactful things you can do to build a company culture of cost accountability, transparency, and efficiency. It could very well be the piece of the FinOps puzzle you’ve been missing.
to see for yourself how data insights from CloudZero can change your whole perspective of cloud spend.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
