It’s a little after 7 in the morning and I tap the space bar key to wake my Macbook Air from it’s slumber. I click a tab in Chrome, hit refresh, and with a slight pang of “what will I see,” look at the balance for our October cloud infrastructure bill. You may know this feeling… think about a recent time opening the credit card bill and dreading an unwanted surprise.

“I don’t think I overspent this month, but… there was that steak dinner in New York City …”

Monitoring the rate of spend to make sure we’re not going to break the budget is one task in the routine as the “cloud cost czar.” It’s a daily task to track the trend lines and sound the alarm if expenses start to creep off plan.

The “czar” is the human gas pedal – modulating the enormous pulsing “cloud software engine” as we process half a terabyte of data a day.

But I am not a solo act in this cloud pageant. Making the cloud work from an economic perspective is a total team effort. It all starts in the engineering group with cloud-appropriate core architecture designs. And continues with quality testing, and and then to the team that manages daily operations. Everyone plays a role and has responsibility for our prime directive: process the most amount of data at least cost, without sacrificing customer satisfaction.

“Obsessively” managing cost is one of the three design requirements, alongside reliability and performance. “Gaming the cloud,” our internal slang for all we do to maximize efficiency, is a multi-disciplined effort the engineering and service delivery teams rally around. But there has to be a least one person who focuses on the trends, the 30,000 foot view down to sea-level: The Cost Czar.

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