Leveraging FinOps

Cost is always a primary concern, particularly when teams are first venturing into the serverless arena. But serverless not only turns observability inside out; it turns the concern for costs on its head. Instead of worrying about costs, we will leverage them as a powerful tool for self-governance, because the correlation between serverless costs and performance enables autonomous teams to utilize this financial information to continuously tune and optimize the operation of their subsystems.

Let’s see how we can use cost as a metric, dissect the typical monthly serverless cloud invoice, and explore worth-based development and tuning.

Cost is a metric

Cost was not a very useful metric back when I first started building and running systems in the cloud, well before serverless came around. In those days my monthly cloud bill just told me how many hours of AWS EC2 instances and AWS RDS databases I had used. Those values were very monolithic. They did...