[Jgrubb]

See, the problem is that the people who care about cost performance and the people who care about UX performance are rarely the same people, and often neither side is empowered with the data or experience they need to bridge the gap.

[bushbaba]

Hardware is cheap relative to salaries. It might take 1 engineer 1 quarter to optimize. Compare that to a few thousand per server.

[Jgrubb]

Ok but we're in a thread about Ubers cloud bills, which are probably well into the 9 figures annually. It definitely gets talked about in board meetings.

Global public cloud spend is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I wouldn't be surprised if it's AWS's marketing team that came up with the talking point about how much more expensive developer time is.

Edit: put this another way- wherever you work, you might know what parts of the architecture need some performance work but do you know what parts of the architecture cost the most money?

[JackSlateur]

A couple of years ago, I optimize some shit and reduced the annual billing of 150k€/y, for a 3 days of work

I might say, "hardware" is expensive compared to (my) salary :)

[notyourwork]

There isn’t always low hanging fruit. And when there is, it likely requires engineering knowledge to know it exists.

[sgarland]

There almost always is, actually. If you’re in the cloud and aren’t a tiny startup, that means you’ve had team[s] building your infrastructure, probably led by devs at some point.

It doesn’t take engineering knowledge to browse through CloudWatch metrics and see that your average CPU utilization is in the single digits.

[sgarland]

It might take an engineer with no prior RDBMS knowledge a quarter to be able to optimize a DB for their use case, but then it’s effectively free. You found the optimal parameters to use for writer nodes? Great, roll that out to the fleet.