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Tangoe noted VPs are increasingly looking to engineers and developers to help wrangle cloud costs
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Cloud-based digital transformation is set to continue through 2026, Gartner predicted, meaning developers have a chance to lead the charge in the cost battle
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Understanding cloud resources and what they need for a given project from development to production will give developers a leg up
We don’t mean to put pressure on the little guy. We know the big decisions enterprises take are and will remain largely in the hands of higher-ups. But if expense-management company Tangoe is to be believed, developers have a critical role to play when it comes to keeping cloud costs in check. The key? Really understanding cloud resources.
Paolo Sellari, Tangoe’s senior product manager of cloud, told Silverlinings it’s true that vice presidents across departments are generally responsible for taking decisions such as what cloud will be used for what services based on contract rates they were able to secure. However, he added “we’re noticing that architects are being brought in to assist in the decision-making and then the developers get educated on the why and what they can use. And there’s more encouragement around analyzing performance versus cost.”
Sellari explained that developers are in a position to be at the “forefront” of the cloud cost battle and can help enterprises avoid things like shadow IT costs and egress charges by better understanding what resources they need for the goal they’re trying to achieve.
“If a developer is coding an analytics tool and structuring a data lake and a warehouse to house the data and transport that, they have to worry about performance, speed, processing that amount of data and performance of the UI and UX,” he explained. “The decisions they make there can severely impact the cost and stability of performance with a cloud provider.”
He provided the example of a developer choosing to pull refresh data every minute or hour when the data really changes once every 24 hours. In that case, it would make more sense to pull it once a day to dramatically cut back on egress charges.
And if they want to host terabytes of data and choose the wrong hosting tool or storage service, that could again significantly impact cost and performance.
Gartner predicted that global end-user spending on the public cloud will jump from $597.3 billion in 2023 to $724.6 billion in 2024. It also forecast 75% of organizations will adopt a cloud-based digital transformation model by 2026.
That means decisions made in a dev environment for products that are ultimately going to be launched put the developer “almost at the forefront” of cloud cost management, Sellari concluded.