Why You Should Choose Duckbill

Duckbill’s Cost Management Philosophy

We believe that:

… cloud cost management is primarily an Engineering problem, not a Finance problem. The drivers of cloud costs are engineering (read: architectural) choices. Cost is a core aspect of making intentional engineering decisions, right alongside performance, reliability, operability, observability, and security. Only Engineering is capable of driving material, long-lasting cloud cost controls.

… Finance is making a good run at doing Engineering’s job in managing costs, but that can only work so well. No engineer wants to hear questions from Finance about resizing instances, whether they really need those new EBS volumes, or whether certain S3 objects can be moved to Glacier. And yet, here we are. 

… the only reason Finance is on Engineering’s ass is because Engineering is (unintentionally!) abdicating responsibility. It’s absolutely not intentional, but it’s still happening. In many cases, Engineering has other priorities, too few staff, not enough tooling, and a myriad of other challenges preventing the team from truly owning the cost of its systems.

… cost management is a problem that must be solved mostly by people, not software. Software enables people to ask better questions, analyze better data, and make better decisions. Software can’t make the judgment calls necessary to properly manage costs — that’s the job for expert humans.

… the problem with a cloud bill isn’t that it’s large. The real problems are that the bill is opaque and unpredictable, seems to have runaway growth, and gives leaders a pervasive feeling of not being able to influence it.

… everything old is new again: These problems are the same ones we had running in data centers. Finance has always been concerned about technology spend. Cloud infrastructure made every cost much more visible and, in some ways, more painful. Cloud infrastructure also created opportunities to manage costs in ways we couldn’t in the data center.

… an improved relationship between Finance and Engineering would do us all a whole lot of good. The CFO and CTO are tied at the hip. In many organizations, these partners need, shall we say, some marriage counseling.