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A single line of code can shape an organization's financial future. Erik Peterson, the CTO and founder at CloudZero, presentedan engineeringperspective on cloud cost optimization during day three at QCon San Francisco. His session was part of the "Architecting for the Cloud" track.

Petersons talk focusedon five real examples of "million-dollar lines of code" and how this can challenge conventional views on engineering's pivotal role in cloud cost optimization. He startedhis talk by emphasizing the importance of considering costs as a critical metric often overlooked in engineering decisions. He statedthat every engineering decision is a purchasing decision, and harboring unwarranted skepticism about cloud services can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Next, Peterson discussed five practical examples with code samples, which include optimizing debug lines to curb logging costs, streamlining API usage to reduce expenses, being mindful of database write volumes to control costs, ensuring resource cleanup in infrastructures as code, and the potential benefits of rewriting code related to content delivery networks.

One of the examples was regarding a debugging statement that led to high costs:

In the code sample, Peterson showed the Lambda function in question (obfuscated from the real function):

The problem was the line of code with the logger.debug statement that generated the cost. The solution was to delete that line.

Peterson's key takeawaysfrom theexamples included:

And provided a quote from Donald Knuth:

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%

He continued that all the examples he provided were only problems at scale. Peterson statedthat software engineers deploying to the public cloud should think about the following questions iteratively and over time, not all at once:

Regarding the last question, he stresses that the metric to answering the money question is not money (cost) but tracking your desiredCloud Efficiency Rate (CER).

Peterson states that the CER should become a non-functional requirement for any cloud project, with defined stages to aid prioritization. These stages are:

Lastly, Peterson ended the session with a final thought from Sir Tony Hoare:

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

Note that there is a QCon London session on the null reference billion-dollar mistake: Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake

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An Engineering Perspective on Cloud Cost Optimization: Erik ... - InfoQ.com