Latest / Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations / How a CTO Uses Energy Budgets to Reduce Cloud Costs by 30 Percent
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a conversation I keep hearing from CTOs — they've already done the obvious stuff: rightsized instances, reserved instances, maybe even moved to Spot. But cloud bills still creep up five to ten percent every month. So what's next? Luna: Yeah, I've seen that pattern too. Once you pick the low-hanging fruit, the curve flattens but never really bends. Lucas: Right. And one approach I came across recently — it's not a FinOps tool, it's a mindset shift. It's called 'energy budgets.' Borrowed from embedded systems, where you literally have a battery and you cannot exceed a certain milliwatt-hour draw per cycle. Luna: So you're capping your cloud spend like a battery? That's pretty literal. Luna: I want to zoom out for a second. This approach — it's not just for FinTech, right? Could any company with a cloud footprint do this? Lucas: I think so. The prerequisites are minimal: you need some way to measure per-service compute consumption — cloud providers give you that — and you need a culture where teams own their services. If you have those two things, you can start with a spreadsheet. The dashboard is nice, but not essential. Luna: What about the argument that this adds overhead? Teams already have too many metrics. Why add another? Lucas: That's fair. Anjali's response was: if you're already tracking latency, error rate, and throughput, energy is just another dimension. And it's one that correlates with cost directly. So it replaces the need for separate cost tracking. Her teams actually dropped their monthly cloud cost reports after implementing the energy dashboard. Luna: So it simplifies, not complicates. I like that. And it's interesting that the number one impact wasn't the optimization — it was the deletion of unnecessary services. That's often the hardest thing to do. Lucas: Yeah. And I think that's the biggest lesson. It's not about squeezing more efficiency out of existing code. It's about asking: should this code exist at all? The energy budget forces that question. Luna: Speaking of existing code, there's a parallel here with something else. We talk a lot on this show about tools and frameworks that help teams make better decisions. And it reminds me — the reason we can keep having these conversations ad-free is because listeners who find value in the show choose to support it. Lucas: That's true. If today's conversation gave you something usable, or just a new way to think about a problem, and you want to help us keep going without sponsors, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to chip in. Luna: And every contribution genuinely helps us stay independent and focused on what we think is interesting — not what an advertiser wants us to cover. Lucas: So back to the energy budget idea. I think one of the reasons it works is that it forces a conversation about value. Luna: Value per watt-hour, essentially. Lucas: Exactly. And that's a conversation most engineering organizations don't have explicitly. They talk about value per developer, or value per feature, but rarely value per unit of infrastructure. Luna: Do you see this becoming a standard practice? Like, five years from now, will every cloud-native company have energy budgets? Lucas: I think it's possible. The environmental angle is growing, and cloud costs aren't going down. If you combine the sustainability driver with the cost driver, energy budgets are a natural framework. But it requires a CTO who's willing to be a bit unconventional. Luna: And willing to have those tough conversations about what stays and what goes. Lucas: Right. But honestly, those conversations are better had proactively than reactively during a cost crisis. So maybe the real benefit is giving teams a chance to make those decisions on their own terms. Luna: That's a good note to end on. Thanks for bringing this one in, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks for the conversation. See you next time.