The Rise of Cloud Costs, and How to Optimize Them | Plaid’s Mark Robinson

**Mark Robinson** (0:00)
There's a million little blind alleyways that you're spending on that you don't even realize. Like, there's just so much, someone set it up, it must be right, and you go back and look at it, and you're like, no, that's just wrong. Amazon bills you a lot for networking fees, but by default, they send all your S3 traffic out to the internet, and we'll then bill you for that.
But if you flip this one little toggle, it goes internally, and it's such a huge change, it'll save you a fortune if you do a lot of S3. We actually had our account rep call us up and ask if we were down because our traffic drops so much that they're like, okay, something must be wrong because obviously it was set up correctly before, and now all this traffic is missing. And we're like, no, no, we did this on purpose.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:43)
Yeah, I actually have a phrase for this I call disabling the suck.

**Mark Robinson** (0:47)
Yeah.

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**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:29)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Dev Interrupted Podcast. I'm Ben Lloyd Pearson, the Director of Developer Relations here at Linear B. I'm joined by Mark Robinson, an Infrastructure Engineer at Plaid.
Mark, thanks for showing up today.

**Mark Robinson** (1:42)
Thanks for having me here in the Cone of Silence.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:43)
Yeah, the Cone of Silence is a great name. We're actually going to have to put that on the sign on the outside.
So, you know, you bring a wealth of experience to the podcast today, so apart from your time here at Plaid, you worked at places like Uber, among other pretty big names. But your work at Plaid is what really caught the eye of our team here at Dev Interrupted, and is why we wanted to bring you on the show. So, you spent about five years at the company, right? Yeah. And at that time, from what we learned, you helped save 25% in cost, you just said? Yeah. Optimizing existing resources and removing waste. In fact, I guess this has become a bit of a personal crusade for you, because there's even a quote out there from you that says, if you're not careful, cloud computing can lose more money faster than any invention in history.
So, let's start there. How did cloud computing get so expensive?

**Mark Robinson** (2:38)
It's always these little things.
A lot of the way the cloud computing is sold, like the initial cloud computing was just, here's a data center, we'll write you machines. And then sort of the next revolution was, we'll sell you individualized services.
But instead of paying these flat rates, like you buy this much capacity and then that's your limit, it'll just scale up as much as you want. So there was no forcing function to push people back. So it's, oh, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this. And there's a lot of really subtle bills. Like if you've looked at Amazon's pricing sheet, it's horrifically complex. Like it's, okay, you buy the server, and then you buy the data transfer, and then you buy the data storage, and then you buy the data access to the data storage, and it just starts adding up really fast. Traditionally, in a lot of places, you just have to say, like, okay, we're at capacity. It'll take three months to order another server, deal with it. Now it's just like, oh, spin up more, launch in another data center, store more data. You don't run out of resources, so you just keep spending.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:38)
That's fascinating, because it's one of the probably clearest examples I've ever seen of a slippery slope, right? It's like, you know, people originally got into cloud computing because it was a way to save costs versus buying everything yourself. But now it's just, the sky's the limit, you know, right?
So what made you start this journey into understanding how to save costs? Was it motivated by external factors, or was it more of like an internal drive?