Building Blocks | February 2023

In this edition

• Cloud cost optimization: Is it shifting left?

• Top developer tools in 2022

• Green software engineering: A move towards sustainability

• Eliminate Kubernetes node scaling lag | Exposing vulnerabilities in cloud security

Building Blocks February 2023 edition is here! In this edition, we talk about the role of developers in optimizing cloud cost, top developer tools in 2022 listed by StackShare, and move towards sustainable software development practices. Plus, some recommendations for the weekend.

Happy reading!

IN FOCUS

Cloud cost optimization: Is it shifting left?

Developers traditionally focus on delivering quality software efficiently, ignoring the infrastructure costs. With the increasing use of public cloud services, organizations aim to optimize cloud costs without affecting business operations and are ready to shift this responsibility to their engineering teams.

Jennifer Rice and Anna Matlin from Airbnb shared insight about how they developed a cost-effective strategy to understand how teams use AWS resources and how planned architectural and infrastructure changes would impact their future AWS costs.

Similarly, the music streaming company Spotify successfully built its cost management tool – Cost Insights, which is integrated with its internal developer platform Backstage. James Governor, in his blog, has shared how Spotify’s cost modeling became part of their engineering process.

As per Wall Street Journal, Netflix is trying to control rising cloud costs with its longtime cloud partner AWS. The report states that they are planning to reduce the number of copies of data they hold worldwide.

Organizations are shifting their focus to introduce cloud cost management early in the software development lifecycle to help developers gain insight into their cloud expenses. Furthermore, when organizations embrace a solid shift-left FinOps approach, it will help with overall cost reduction and accurate future cost forecasting.

With the ongoing trend, accountability for cloud costs will shift to the development teams. To define budgets, keep costs under control, and accurately forecast expenses, engineers must be involved as owners of the majority of resources. With the right strategies, development teams can save costs while still being able to utilize the cloud to its fullest potential.

"You will see FinOps information shift closer to the developer and end up part of pull-request infrastructure down the line.” - Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation

TOOLS

Top developer tools in 2022

The 2022 StackShare Awards list is out with the 50 best new tools released last year and the top tools from different categories. 

New Tool – Astro came out on top as the new tool for the year 2022. Astro is a static site builder that delivers lightning-fast performance with a modern developer experience.  

Application Hosting – Firebase, designed to power real-time collaborative applications continues to hold the top spot.

Web Server – NGINX, a high-performance open source web server continues to hold the top spot.

Build, Test, and Deploy – GitHub continues to be the popular choice for code collaboration, review, and management.

Monitoring – Grafana moved up in ranking this year to bag the top tool in the Monitoring category.

Check here to see if your favorite tool made it to the list. 

IN ACTION

Green software engineering: A move towards sustainability

With growing digitalization and a shift to cloud computing, the world of tech is impacting our environment and increasing our carbon footprint. This has led to the rise of Green software engineering, a movement focused on promoting sustainable software development practices that minimize the environmental impact of technology.

Thilo Hermann, VP at Capgemini has shared the underlying principles to consider when building a green application and highlighted some of the strategies to analyze before taking the step forward. 

Mark Harrison, System Architect at Microsoft highlights the three things that software developers can do to build and deploy sustainable software applications.

Recently, Microsoft partnered with Swiss Bank UBS and the Green Software Foundation to provide architectural guidance on how to implement two open source tools for carbon-aware computing: Software Carbon Intensity Specification calculates a carbon intensity score for software and Carbon Aware SDK  enables the creation of energy-efficient software solutions. Read more about how UBS implemented carbon-aware computing to reduce carbon emissions of their risk platform.

Last year, AWS released the Customer Carbon Footprint tool that measures the estimated carbon emission from the use of AWS services.

Intel’s Software Development Assistant allows developers to measure efficiency of their applications by taking energy measurements from their systems.

Many organizations are striving for sustainability – calling for energy and cost-efficient products and services. They can start by driving awareness, adopting green software development practices, and measuring their software performance in line with its energy efficiency.

"We envision a future where carbon-free software is standard – where software development, deployment, and use, contribute to the global climate solution.” - Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub