3 Steps to Use Observability Tools
to Optimize Cloud Spend
Networking Dinner at Artemis Grill & Sky Bar, Singapore

Here’s what we discussed:

We all have expensive bills to pay to AWS, Azure, and GCP, but to be successful we need to think about optimization as more than just cost reduction. To do that 3 things are critical to cost optimization.

The first is to remove unnecessary overhead and waste. The problem is that most companies stop here. They have a FinOps team that just tells everyone to use less and spend less. The second key is to prioritize effectiveness and efficiency. This means focusing on your business objectives and ensuring that your engineering efforts are contributing to achieving those objectives. The last one is to build a culture of ownership where these principles are woven into the way that everyone thinks about and performs work.

In this invitation-only roundtable discussion, we talked about all three of the above, including:

1. Why companies are adopting serverless technologies to ensure they are only paying for what they are using.
2. Why service level objectives (SLOs) are a good way to measure what matters to users and the business, and how tracing and profiling can help.
3. How successful end-to-end service ownership means that service teams are responsible for the reliability, security, and cost of their services instead of just tossing it over the wall to FinOps.