3 Thoughts on Building a Thriving Cloud Infrastructure Economy

Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

Costs are one of the most crucial areas of Cloud Infrastructure. When money was cheap, you could ask for whatever you wanted. Now that it’s expensive, the priority is to follow a cost-aware culture.

I’m talking about the reality of a truly organic, dynamic and thriving marketplace. A state of maturity where you have a clear productisation of your platform, with a supply and demand mindset, driving its profits towards an area and company growth. A full working economy within a company.

I can’t avoid these 3 topics when thinking about this:

Observability

You need to be able to answer simple and clear questions:

1. How many calls were made to our public API from customer X?
2. How many resources were used by customer X?
3. Are there any optimisations in terms of architecture we can do to reduce costs without affecting the overall performance of our platform?

This requires cross-cutting observability functionalities throughout the platform and powerful, yet easy-to-use, reporting tools to measure usage and costs.

Observability = Transparency.

Productisation

Imagine going to a restaurant, having your dinner and receiving your bill. But instead of listing what you ate, you get a mile-long paper with all the expenses required to make your dish, from electricity, gas, usage of cutlery, and even the social security of the intern that chopped carrots.

Tech Platforms need to productise themselves the same way that regular businesses do, wrapping their costs around the final products they offer to customers.

Imagine paying for a pack of 100 build pipelines. You can top it up with the add-on of a security check to ensure that your code is up to standards. Or for X amount of storage. And if you need, you can replicate it across the globe for redundancy.

Think of your customers and productise your platform. It will make everything easier.

Thriving Ecosystem

The end goal is to have a fully functioning economy driven by internal or external customers, making every business unit grow.

In my mind, these are three clear consequences of this type of internal economy:

1. You can use your profits for salary revisions and/or hiring new elements
2. You’ll have a clear incentive to optimise your operation, lowering its cost without affecting your customers
3. Have clarity over the most used products and where you should devote your energy

Stop passing budgets around and think about selling products, thriving businesses and keeping your customers happy.

📣 What are your thoughts on this? Completely mental or an interesting vision? By the way, are you aware of FinOps and have you read the latest OpenCost Specification?