A CTO’s perspective

AWS provides discounts in exchange for Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments to use specific services or spend an agreed amount over a 1 or 3 year term. We use RIs & SPs to deliver these savings but without creating the standard 1 and 3 year lock-in to a particular usage profile.

This “rate optimization” is an entirely financial form of cloud cost saving. It requires no technical infrastructure changes. We analyze metadata about what cloud services you’re using and what costs AWS has applied. We manage commitments in dedicated AWS accounts that are entirely separate to your cloud accounts to deliver savings without distracting your team or limiting your choices for future development.

The best technical outcomes come from combining the best engineers with the best technology. Providing the freedom to solve problems based on choices made on technical suitability is key to attracting and retaining the best engineers. 

Set against feature delivery, performance, availability and security, cost rarely ranks near the top of an engineer’s list of priorities. The CTO challenge is that cost cannot be ignored. The balancing act is to enable technical freedom to consistently deliver results while demonstrating the efficiency and control vital to justify current spend and gain approval for future initiatives.