For the past year I held the unelected position of “Cloud Cost Czar.” I have written about the duties such a role entails in A Day in the Life of a Cloud Cost Czar. Recently I handed over the cost czar responsibility to a colleague who will carry on the daily routines and continue to improve our cloud cost management endeavors. In the handoff process, almost a year to the day of assuming the czar’s responsibilities, I reflected on the previous twelve months and all the accomplishments the company made as a united team to “tame the cloud.”
I created a graph to visualize the dramatic change over one calendar year. To the right is an area graph that shows subscriber seats (in green) overlaid on subscriber costs (blue, orange and red; our principle costs are cloud compute and two types of cloud storage.) As subscriber growth increased, costs went up, peaked, and then went down over the course of one year. The rise, peak, and subsequent decline all map to various cost cutting efforts initiated by Sonian engineering and support groups.
Throughout the year we got smarter on how to “purchase” compute time for less than retail, how to store more customer data while consuming less cloud storage, and how to process more customer data using fewer CPU hours. In the cloud, we re-affirmed with a high-five on each improvement, we were in control of our cost destiny. This is when the phrase “infrastructure as code” really means something.
My Blogging Process
I am pleasantly surprised to see a correlation between blogging and presentation quality. Maybe I should have realized this before, but I have noticed when I give a presentation on a theme that I had previously blogged about, the presentation feels more successful (speak more passionately & authoritatively, better audience engagement, “at one with my topic”). But of course this should make sense, since the blogging effort forces my brain to get a full 360 comprehension, and the physical act of typing out a thought stream organically cements the concepts for easier recall at the podium.
Content Creation Mechanics
My writing workflow starts with a text file containing a list of potential topics or post titles that sound compelling to me. Before an item gets on the list it may be scratched out in a small Circa notebook that I carry around. For some reason I have not gravitated toward writing notes on my smart phone. Probably because most ideas pop into my head while I am driving, and writing the idea on paper is safer than typing at 70 MPH.
Ninety percent of my writing is in a Google Doc. It’s best for how I work. If I am on an airplane I’ll write the text in Textmate. And rarely, in a “We’re doing this live, folks” manner, I’ll write a post directly into WordPress.
Google Docs allows me to start a post and then continue to edit from any computer or my iPad. Most writing is at the shared computer in the kitchen in the early morning or on my Macbook later at night. With GDocs, I never have to worry about losing work. I have been burned a few times by composing directly into WordPress and losing the session and the text.
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Posted on April 28th, 2012 in Commentary FWIW | No Comments »