As a cloud cost intelligence company, we often like to say “every line of code is a buying decision”. If you’re running on AWS or one of the other big cloud providers, you know that a simple decision about how to architect an application can have a significant impact on your future cost of goods sold (COGS). However, in my experience, many engineering teams don’t discuss cost — at least not until it’s already become a problem.
This is a follow up to a blog series where we explore DIY cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimization tools. In the first, we investigated how Lyft, Netflix, Segment, Expedia, and Slack built theirs. Check it out here. “Build versus buy” is the eternal question for every engineering and DevOps team setting out to solve a technical problem. In the cloud cost monitoring and optimization world, both options can take on many forms.