Erik Peterson

Erik Peterson is the founder and chief technology officer of CloudZero, a Boston, Massachusetts, company whose software shows engineering and finance teams what their cloud spending pays for, down to features, products, and customers. He worked in application security before starting CloudZero in 2016, and his recurring line is “every engineering decision is a buying decision.”

A $3,000 Budget at Veracode

Before CloudZero he worked at Veracode, an application security company. Around 2009 a Veracode customer wanted tens of thousands of websites tested, and Peterson was given $3,000 to do it on AWS. He scaled to 1,500 servers using cheap spot capacity and finished within budget, he told the AWS Startups Blog. “We built a system that generated millions of dollars in revenue, for $3,000,” he said in a later talk.

The broader rollout taught him the lesson CloudZero is built on: “you take some of the smartest engineers you’ve worked with, and you give them this powerful tool, AWS, and if they don’t have guardrails and guidance, they will go off and do amazing things that cost amazing amounts of money.”

Runaway Cloud Costs

In conference talks he treats runaway cloud cost as a software defect. One example he shows involves DynamoDB, Amazon’s database service, where a timestamp a few bytes too long pushed each write just past a 1,024-byte limit and doubled what it cost. “There will be more scrutiny on that expense report for that $20 lobster dinner, maybe $50 lobster dinner, than there will be for the line of code that spends a million dollars,” he said in a talk published by InfoQ.