Shifting cost optimisation left: Spotify Backstage Cost Insights – James Governor's Monkchips

This is a big deal and "FinOps" is in my opinion a key strategy to making sure that your cloud services are efficient.

Cloud is taking an increasing share of customer IT budgets in almost all product categories That’s a lot of cost to optimise, particularly given the huge number of AWS services that customers are using, and are constantly being introduced. FinOps vendors generally come at the world from the perspective of the finance person rather than the engineer, though. As Spotify looked to reduce its spend, its first initiative–before engineering-centred initiatives like Cost Insights–was top down, focusing on better forecasting and pre-booking GCP resources.

Designing software well in the cloud requires an understanding of the modeled costs during design, and the actual costs at run-time, along with methods to drive further efficiency over time.