2023-02-18 - Measuring platform productivity
labor market updates
Date range: 2022-02-01 to 2022-02-18
Increase in median wages for AWS FinOps Engineers (+2.27%)
Large increase in open roles for AWS FInOps Engineers (+71.43%)
Large increase in ML Engineer demand (+105.68%)
Large decrease in wages for AWS Networking Engineers (-12.27%)
Decrease in median posting duration for Data Engineers and Solution Architects (-5.10%)
our take
FinOps and ML disciplines are going through another growth phase; expect the quantity of job openings to increase.
Data Engineers & Solution Architects are being hired faster; we expect wage pressures to continue and job postings to decline marginally over the next month.
notable aws releases
AWS Instance Scheduler: No more custom scripts and tagging logic to configure start and stop schedules for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances, now you can use a native AWS solution to manage costs.
a brief rant on the benefits of platforms (i.e. cloud)
AWS’ revenue growth rate, along with other major cloud providers, is slowing.
FinOps professionals may be contributing their fair share to this slowdown, but there seems to be another trend taking hold - one where folks are moving servers on-premise (again).
David Hansson, CTO of basecamp and partner at 37signals, recently announced that they were leaving the cloud. As for his rationale, he makes some good points - utilizing cloud infrastructure when your workloads are irregular, or when you are just getting your product off the ground, are indeed good reasons to select cloud over bare-metal. But he misses the bigger picture. The cloud is a platform; a platform that standardizes development and increases innovation rates.
“Now the [rebuttal] always goes: … The savings will all be there in labor costs! Except no. Anyone who thinks running a major service like HEY or Basecamp in the cloud is "simple" has clearly never tried.”
Er, except yes. No one said managing large-scale systems was easy but measuring the performance of software teams has been studied for some time now and the results are in.
“Through six years of research [and data from more than 31,000 professionals worldwide], the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:
Deployment Frequency—How often an organization successfully releases to production
Lead Time for Changes—The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
Change Failure Rate—The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
Time to Restore Service—How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production
At a high level, Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes measure velocity, while Change Failure Rate and Time to Restore Service measure stability…”
Some of the more interesting insights from the Aug. 2019 study:
Elite performers are more likely to use the cloud: “…teams were 24 times more likely than low performers to execute on all five capabilities of cloud computing defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which include on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.”
Most cloud users aren’t using it to its full potential: Only 29% of respondents who use cloud met all five of NIST’s above-mentioned criteria. This underscores the fact that organizations who claim to use cloud computing haven’t necessarily adopted all the essential patterns that matter for driving elite performance.
Low performers use more proprietary software than high and elite performers: elite performers were 1.75 times more likely to make extensive use of open source components, libraries, and platforms.
conclusion(s)
Now, maybe you are actually one of the few scenarios requiring on-prem or dedicated servers - you are like Box, approaching a billion in ARR and looking to save on energy costs, or you work for an ad exchange or HFT firm where nanosecond latency matters - but for the vast majority of applications (and businesses) the question to ask first is not “should I abandon the cloud?”, it’s “am I getting the most out of what I am already paying for?”. To answer that, we turn to FinOps.
up next
FinOps KPIs: Why you need fewer KPIs (and a north star)
In-depth FinOps OSS reviews
sources used in this post