There are a couple points that resonate with me. I strongly believe there is a need to provide transparency and accountability to cloud engineers. How many cloud enginners know the exact list of resources they own in all accounts and regions they have access to? How much money do cloud provider make out abandonned, zombie, long-forgotten resources?
What they built sound nice and feature-rich but also quite complex. I just finished adding a (simplier) feature to the SaaS I am building. It generates individual reports with the list of resources owned by the user, the associated cost and flag for thise which are likely unused.
I will post of Show HN soon, but if you are interested in cloud efficiency, I would love you feedback! https://li10.com
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
I totally agree with you!
There are so many layers we could optimize, with various level of difficulty and return in term of cost and co2 reduction.
Legacy tech stack are especially wasteful: HW + OS + App running 24/7 regardless if it used or not.
My intuition is that AWS claims they can reduce CO2 emissions from your onprem stack by 80% because *IF* it was rewritten into a serverless app, it would consume energy only when it runs.
Hi there! I'm Matt. Leader in cloud technologies, with a 17-year track record in both the US and EU. As a Senior Director of Cloud Solution Architecture at NTT DATA, I lead the development of AWS serverless, SaaS, big data, and ML applications. I also coach our cloud engineering talent pool.
Back in the Flux7 days, an AWS consulting startup I called home, we pulled off a solid 50% YoY growth, paving the way for an acquisition by NTT DATA. It was quite an adventure, demanding a blend of technical skills and business acumen.
Dedicated to fostering sustainable IT practices, I built https://www.li10.com, a SaaS helping cloud engineers lighten their cloud environmental footprint.
Location: Germany
Remote: Yes, worked remotely for US customers for 6 years
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: AWS, serverless, CI/CD, Python/Node/Typescript, MongoDB, Docker, LLM
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbuchner/
Email: [email protected]
Most cloud providers already claim being carbon neutral for EU and US regions. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste there too, so there goes the little bit of green energy we have.
Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.
I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.
Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.
The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year.
I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.
If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.
It shows illustrates the dependency between GDP, population, energy and emissions. Assuming we don't want to reduce population and GDP, we are left with optimizing energy and emission intensity.
I agree both Hertz and Accenture share some responsibility here. I didn't mean to blame it all on Hertz.
"They might have been better off building a team internally". For a business critical projects, building the team internally and using the right partner is the way to go imho... if budget allows, which they had plenty.
Here is my summary of the mistakes Hertz made:
- hired the vendor based on a cool demo & vendor size
- did not have a Hertz employee as Product Owner
- tried to go big fast instead of taking an iterative approach
- did not implement proper tests & validation
- spent $10M without building internal skills
Disclaimer: I am totally bias here as I am consultant and our business model is to help our customers with their digital transformation while teaching them devops and cloud technology.
$10M for a project of this size and importance does not seem unreasonable to me. The big mistake is that they didn't seem to have a plan to take ownership of the project and learn the skills required to carry the project forward without Accenture.
What they built sound nice and feature-rich but also quite complex. I just finished adding a (simplier) feature to the SaaS I am building. It generates individual reports with the list of resources owned by the user, the associated cost and flag for thise which are likely unused.
I will post of Show HN soon, but if you are interested in cloud efficiency, I would love you feedback! https://li10.com