We saved $89K in three days and people were still unhappy

We found $89K of savings. Instead of a win: a political fight about impact and ownership.

Spending money is easy; getting cost optimizations approved is not. No clear decision maker, three meetings, double-digit precision.

Past Savings Plans, cost optimization is a distributed systems problem. I’ll show how that applies, how to build cost-efficient infra, and how to bring the organization along so a proposal doesn’t get stranded.

This talk is about getting lower bills, not talking about them.