Cloud cost Achilles’ heel: Developer education
CIOs should also embrace DevOps practices tied to cost reduction when consuming cloud resources, Sellers says. One pitfall that doesn’t get enough attention: Many organizations don’t educate developers on the cost of cloud services, despite the glut of developer services large cloud providers make trivial to call.
“I’ve lost track of how many services Amazon provides that developers can just use, and some of those can be quite expensive, but a developer doesn’t really know that,” Sellers says. “They’re like, ‘Instead of writing my own solution to this, I can just call this service that Amazon already provides, and boom, my job is done.’”
The disconnect between developers and financial factors in the cloud is a real problem that leads to increased cloud costs, adds Nick Durkin, field CTO at Harness, provider of an AI-driven software development platform. Without knowing the costs of accessing a cloud-based GPU or CPU, for example, a developer is like a home builder who doesn’t know the cost of wood or brick, Durkin says.
