On: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

[jjav]

> I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.

[Jochim → jjav]

> I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained.

The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount.

> I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.