Intellyx BrainBlog for Loft Labs in The New Stack, by Jason English
Welcome to the cloud native paradise, where development teams can grab the exact preconfigured Kubernetes clusters they need from a self-service engineering platform, and they are ready to scale across hybrid cloud infrastructures in a multitenant way wherever they are deployed.
Self-service provisioning and multitenancy eliminate useless toil and resource constraints from software delivery. Dev teams waste no valuable time getting the clusters they need, when they need them, so it is also cheaper.
Therefore, we can plan to impress the CFO with a better ratio of total value delivered to the business, versus total cost of ownership for the software. Problem solved!
But like everything else in software development, we must expect the unexpected. Developers may still find themselves mucking with infrastructure instead of coding, and surprises inevitably await when it comes time to pay the cloud bill for dev, test, staging and production environments.
How should we balance cost and performance goals when scaling up cloud native environments?
Cloud Costs: Hard to Measure, Hard to Evaluate
By my last count, there are dozens of vendors claiming to reduce public cloud compute and storage fees through various forms of limiting consumption through the account interface.
That’s useful for a one-time cost improvement, but it fails to consider the complexity and hidden costs of meeting the requirements of a cloud native development team with environments sophisticated enough to meet their needs at scale. This leaves platform teams with several open questions:
- How do you optimize the cost of entry for assembling that “golden path” cloud native architecture?
- Is redundant labor required to configure Infrastructure as Code scripts and permissions for self-service environments if they don’t come out fully baked?
- Beyond cloud fees, what are the support costs of maintaining so many dev and staging labs atop an ever-changing Kubernetes stack?
Obviously, a simple cost equation based on fees and licenses can only tell us half of the story about how to value the capacity for improving software delivery productivity, reducing toil and preventing talent churn.
How do organizations arrive at the real value of cost and performance metrics?
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
