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2021-06-17 22:30:05

As cloud infrastructure service offerings have grown from a small set of services like virtual machines, object storage and networking primitives to an à la carte menu of hundreds of services, maintaining visibility into what services you're using and paying for can be a job in and of itself. As a startup you are rightfully focused on finding product market fit. However very soon after you achieve product market fit, margins start to become important. The sooner you start tending to cloud costs the easier it will be to get under control when the time comes. This post is meant to give a quick overview of how to think about cloud costs when you're just getting up and running as a startup.

As you're navigating to finding product market fit you're typically tracking metrics that are customer focused. Depending on the nature of the company, you may be looking at the number of new user registrations, active user engagement metrics or revenue being generated. Typically, companies will also take a look at technical KPIs like performance of the application and the number of bugs/exceptions that are being raised.

However, one often-forgotten metric that startups fail to track is cloud costs. This is primarily because usage-based infrastructure providers make this information particularly hard to find and track. Startups are usually granted credits from providers like AWS, GCP, Azure and DigitalOcean and forget about them until they expire and are suddenly faced with frantically unpacking their surprise bill. By tracking cost metrics from day 1, you can avoid these scenarios and always know how your infrastructure spend is trending.

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