Summer Replay - Optimizing Cloud Spend at Airbnb with Melanie Cebula
Just because the AWS Cloud hangs above our heads, doesn’t mean your bill needs to be just as sky-high. In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, Corey is joined by Airbnb Staff Software Engineer Melanie Cebula. Her job is to ensure they keep their monthly cloud bill low, and that the cost isn’t just there for a temporary stay. Hear Melanie and Corey chat about the vital role engineers play in helping balance the company books, tricks to optimizing your organization’s cloud spending, how inexperience can have a dangerous effect on cost-cutting, and the growing pains facing today’s world of data infrastructure. We hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane (just be sure you checkout on time to avoid any fees).
Show Highlights:
(0:00) Intro to episode
(0:27) Backblaze sponsor read
(0:54) The role of a Staff Engineer
(2:09) Working for a large company reliant on the cloud
(3:59) Melanie’s Area of Expertise
(5:58) Efficiently Managing AWS Bills
(11:33) Optimizing cloud spend
(14:50) The harmful hesitancy to turn things off
(18:17) Inexperience and cost-saving measures
(21:17) Firefly sponsor read
(21:53) How to avoid snowballing cloud bills
(23:40) Kubernetes and cloud billing
(27:12) The perks of compounding microservices
(29:19) Misconceptions about Kubernetes
(31:10) Growing pains of data infrastructure
(34:44) Where you can find Melanie
About Melanie Cebula
Melanie Cebula is an expert in Cloud Infrastructure, where she is recognized worldwide for explaining radically new ways of thinking about cloud efficiency and usability. She is an international keynote speaker, presenting complex technical topics to a broad range of audiences, both international and domestic. Melanie is a staff engineer at Airbnb, where she has experience building a scalable modern architecture on top of cloud-native technologies.
Besides her expertise in the online world, Melanie spends her time offline on the “sharp end” of rock climbing. An adventure athlete setting new personal records in challenging conditions, she appreciates all aspects of the journey, including the triumph of reaching ever higher destinations.
On and off the wall, Melanie focuses on building reliability into critical systems, and making informed decisions in difficult situations. In her personal time, Melanie hand whisks matcha tea, enjoys costuming and dancing at EDM festivals, and she is a triplet.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/melaniecebula
Melanie Cebula’s website: https://melaniecebula.com/
Sponsors
Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/
Airbnb, with Melanie Cebula
Melanie Cebula is a staff engineer at Airbnb, where she has built a scalable modern architecture on top of cloud native technologies. She regularly shares her knowledge in presentations focusing on cloud efficiency and usability, and today shares the story of Airbnb's Kubernetes migration with hosts Adam and Craig.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com
mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
twitter: @kubernetespod
Chatter of the week Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
River Otter River otter
News of the week Five days of Kubernetes 1.19: Structured logs
API server warning messages
EndpointSlices
Storage capacity tracking
1 year support
TiKV graduates from CNCF incubation
cert-manager 1.0
Episode 75, with James Munnelly
Tanzu Build Service is GA
State of Spring report
AWS Bottlerocket is GA on EKS
Kalm (keep Kalm and karry on) Developer thread on Reddit
CRAFT from Salesforce (and its GitHub repo)
Introducing Kubernetes CSI sidecar containers from HPE by long-time listener Michael "Data" Mattsson
KubeCon EU Virtual YouTube playlist
CNCF to provide another round of CommunityBridge mentorships
Faster services: no CPU limits by Eric Khun Hacker News thread
How GoJek upgrades Kubernetes on GKE by Tasdik Rahman
Links from the interview Melanie Cebula
Our second classically trained musician guest
Early Airbnb architecture
Charon
Programming by toggling switches
Smartstack
Horizontal Pod Autoscaling: minReplicas
Melanie's talks: FutureStack 17: From Monolith to Microservices
KubeCon NA 2018 keynote: Developing at Scale
KubeCon NA 2019: 10 Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes
Melanie Cebula on Twitter
Optimizing Cloud Spend at Airbnb with Melanie Cebula
About Melanie Cebula
Melanie Cebula is an expert in Cloud Infrastructure, where she is recognized worldwide for explaining radically new ways of thinking about cloud efficiency and usability. She is an international keynote speaker, presenting complex technical topics to a broad range of audiences, both international and domestic. Melanie is a staff engineer at Airbnb, where she has experience building a scalable modern architecture on top of cloud-native technologies.
Besides her expertise in the online world, Melanie spends her time offline on the “sharp end” of rock climbing. An adventure athlete setting new personal records in challenging conditions, she appreciates all aspects of the journey, including the triumph of reaching ever higher destinations.
On and off the wall, Melanie focuses on building reliability into critical systems, and making informed decisions in difficult situations. In her personal time, Melanie hand whisks matcha tea, enjoys costuming and dancing at EDM festivals, and she is a triplet.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/melaniecebula
Melanie Cebula’s website: https://melaniecebula.com/