How much does your software cost to operate?

Software design and implementation has an uneasy relationship with cost. As software developers, we often dwell on the cost of building software, but far less so on the cost to operate. The current zeitgeist of pay-as-you-go infrastructure makes this particularly apparent where rigid, hard to deploy and adapt software directly equates to larger bills. If we want to take control of operational cost, it is critical that we start to make operational cost a first-class constraint in the design and architecture of modern software.

In this talk we will work through the idea of price-aware architectures, answering: what are the properties of a price-aware architecture? what happens when we design our systems in a way that can leverage variable price and availability of infrastructure? and finally, how do we implement such systems?

This talk was presented at YOW! West, May 2016.

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