Aim to be resourceful. Because of how directly cost is tied to consumption of resources, it’s also fair to say that it’s an accurate take of overall resourcefulness. If you’re using resources that don’t need to be used to accomplish a task, you’re potentially wasting those resources. Similar to the way you’d design a home to include insulation to trap heat for the winter so as to avoid running up your power bill, design your cloud architectures to make the best use of resources consumed. One of the clearest examples of this? According to Dr. Vogels: Planning your consumption through the use of Reserved Instances and 1-3 year plans. Making use of storage tiers that reflect actual data retrieval. Using eventually consistent reads in DynamoDB vs. strongly consistent reads.

Align cost with revenue. How do you make your money? How can you design to support that from an infrastructure perspective? Dr. Vogels stresses that efficient architectures aim to do just this. Using the example of Amazon, which uses Orders/Minute as a metric of how it makes money, it makes sense to design in such a way to support the rapid scalability and overall capacity to support millions of orders a minute. How can you do this? By building evolvable architectures that aren’t constrained to supporting only one workload, but that make use of efficiencies at every level.

Ensure the business understands Cloud costs. There has to be transparency there. There have to be systems and processes in place to support that and ensure communication is made and that the right understanding is achieved between business units, IT, Cloud, and finance. Making use of the chargeback or showback model is a way to do this. Tagging strategies help immensely!

You can’t know what you don’t measure. Dr. Vogels example of tiny houses in Amsterdam measuring energy consumption from the hallway vs. the basement stands out as a simple reminder of “what’s seen gets tracked.” Taking an active approach to measuring costs is one of the most important steps to managing them. Cost needs to be visible. When you’re aware of spending habits and trends, you can work on them. You also need to know how you are measuring costs—having a poor system can lead to wrong interpretations that cost more than they appear. Leveraging cost management tools available to you natively is an essential component of a successful frugal architecture.

I introduce to you: tunable architectures. The idea here is simple. You can always drive-up costs by increasing consumption, so you need controls in place to keep them in check. Most importantly, these controls need to be available to the business itself, not just to IT. To identify what needs to be turned on and what can be turned off, you can make use of app decomposition to evaluate the most critical components of an app. Dr. Vogels suggested breaking an app into tiers—what are the most critical components of the app that

What are the savings opportunities available to your organization where you are at? Can waste be eliminated? Is there anything you can Stop, Rightsize, Shift, or Reduce? What does your app actually need? More than likely, there is something that can be done. Through the tiering exercise above, you can probably get much more accurate takes on where you should be focusing your valuable money. Dr. Vogels covered one example of how a commonly thrown exception generated a ton of waste in terms of cost for an organization. It’s not always big fixes that need to be made. Incremental changes where your organization is at can sometimes be enough to make a noticeable difference.

This goes hand in hand with the previous, but it’s up to technologists to reconsider architectural and design decisions as time passes and technology improves. Things that once were efficient become less efficient over time, and sometimes a decision made ends up being a bad one down the road. Disconfirming beliefs and abandoning ego in design decisions allows you more options and the ability to make informed choices that are centered on business outcomes instead of technological prerogatives.