It’s funny, I remember many such projects back when my title was “systems engineer”. I swear the appeal was always that company could spend $$ and get a working solution. It after all makes sense that a growing business would need more hardware. But the problem usually was a few terrible queries.
I swear the big benefit of cloud deployments is the teams ability to say “we tried throwing $$ at the problem, if we don’t want to spend $$$ we’ll need to do some work”. And have this convo play out over a day rather than months.
> I swear the big benefit of cloud deployments is the teams ability to say “we tried throwing $$ at the problem, if we don’t want to spend $$$ we’ll need to do some work”. And have this convo play out over a day rather than months.
My current job is on the tail end of hypergrowth and we are just starting to get our arms around the years of hacks and inefficiencies that made it possible to succeed. We've had a dozen conversations where we've decided
* to throw $10^2/day at a problem for two weeks so the engineers are free to deliver the features required to land $10^5/year in ARR, then work on perf
* to analyze the system, identify the one or two features that cost the most, and tackle those while leaving the rest alone
* and yes, to translate inefficiencies to real dollars and use that to force prioritization (we do that a lot ;-))
A team that understands cloud computing and can do some cost forecasting makes some amazing things possible.
I swear the big benefit of cloud deployments is the teams ability to say “we tried throwing $$ at the problem, if we don’t want to spend $$$ we’ll need to do some work”. And have this convo play out over a day rather than months.