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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Cloud computing made financial control the new engineering. Unless your service is running at an astronomical scale, nobody cares that your refactor saved 50 MB of RAM. The cloud vendors don't care if your workload needs 128 MB RAM, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB RAM. They'll run anything. Just pay for it.

The industry is in a weird spot right now where Finance doesn't understand Engineering well enough to provide proper direction on where Engineering spend is truly wasteful (versus necessarily large), and Engineering quite frankly doesn't care, as long as Finance keeps paying the bills. It's rare to find leadership that appreciates both the underlying financial concern as well as where best inside their tech stack the financial waste lies and how to tackle it and prevent it in the first place.

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I always find it so weird that the first time in my whole career that I ever got authority to spend without literally any approval was when we got our cloud account. Every single other thing, even a $10 cab ride, had to be authorised. But when we signed up for AWS I just do whatever I do and finance pays the bill. I still do not understand how this happened.

Just imagine having to ask some guy in accounting to spin up a VM.

This was in fact the status quo before public clouds became popular. Machine time was billed out by the IT department back to projects and departments, so even getting an OpenVZ host would require forms and approvals, and could take weeks if vacations lined up poorly. I assume many companies are still like this. Certainly my current employer is: if you really actually want on-prem compute or storage you can get it, but it's a slog.

IMO this is the easiest way to drive cloud adoption: tell PMs that the cloud is instant but on-prem takes weeks.

But do they have to care? The right answer is to set an actual budget. Finance to engineering: you have $x to work with.

Then engineering cares, and the needed talks/concern about resource usage can happen. Part of engineering is optimization, cost is one metric to optimize.

You need to understand the engineering to set a sensible budget. What should the concrete budget be for a new 50-story skyscraper in New York City? You'd need to know quite a bit about the specific building and the construction market to answer that question. You couldn't just be some MBA with a spreadsheet.

But you are working backwards from how most people and businesses do budgeting

Budgets are not about what things cost, it is about what you or the business can afford.

For example, I do not need to know how much Steak is this week to know I have $100 for food.. If steak fits in the budget then great, if not I get chicken... or beans...

No, you can't decide that you can afford $10 million for concrete so that's what you'll spend. You figure out what it costs, then you figure out how much money you can make from the building, then you decide whether you can build it.dddd

The steak example is different because the steak has a price tag on it.

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