Cutting cloud costs: without cutting yourself on the way, Cloud Team at Ocado

In this session, the Cloud Engineering team at Ocado Technology shares practical insights on reducing cloud costs across compute, networking, and observability - without compromising performance or resilience.

Based on their experience running large-scale workloads on AWS, they outline strategies and architectural decisions that helped optimize spending at scale. From custom FinOps dashboards to developer-driven cost awareness, the team demonstrates how engineering can play a leading role in cloud cost efficiency.

They explore the trade-offs and tuning involved in services like CloudFront, NAT Gateway, ECS (both in the cloud and at the Edge), API Gateway, and Load Balancers - sharing not just what worked, but why.

The talk also covers runtime choices including EC2 vs. Fargate, spot instance strategies, instance types, and leveraging IoT Greengrass for on-premise compute - all aimed at driving meaningful savings.

Finally, they address the often-overlooked cost of observability, offering lessons learned on managing logs, metrics, and backups with efficiency in mind.

Whether you're an engineer, architect, or tech lead dealing with cloud cost challenges, this session delivers actionable patterns you can start applying right away.

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Speakers: Katarzyna Myrek, Roman Subik, Maciej Mencner, Maciej Józefczyk – Engineering Cloud Team at Ocado Technology

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techBytes is a series of events hosted by Ocado Technology across different countries and focuses on exchanging experiences in the area of engineering practices.