In our team, only like two, maybe three programmers are concerned about our AWS architecture at all. I don't really know why everyone in the team should know how much the individual components of AWS cost. They should just know how to not write performance-destroying code that mandates scaling instances up.
- 10 reasons why AWS costs so much. #7 is mind-boggling.
- AWS costs considered harmful
- "Developer uses one weird trick to reduce cloud bills by 97%. AWS hates him!"
[0]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...
I do think it should be a reasonably common skill to make common tradeoffs without too much investigation.
Besides, the title is an homage to the Latency Numbers article which follows a similar concept. You don't need to memorise numbers, but you probably should be able to reason about them in very vague terms.