Google Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Chapter 13. Serverless Solutions: I Know; the Name Makes My Eye Twitch Too

“Forty percent!” The CFO’s face was turning an interesting shade of red. “I was told we could save up to 40% by moving to the cloud!”

I was sitting in a gleaming conference room at one of those banks with marble columns out front and portraits of founders from the 1800s on the walls. Six months after their “successful” cloud migration, and the monthly infrastructure bills were actually higher than their old data center costs.

“Not if you’re doing the same things you’ve always done,” I said, trying to keep my tone diplomatic. “You don’t think Google knows what it costs to run VMs? They’re not losing money when you rent compute by the hour.”

The lead architect shifted uncomfortably. “We did exactly what the migration consultants recommended. Lift and shift. Everything’s running perfectly in the cloud.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “Your applications are running 24/7, just like they did in your data center. But I bet half of them sit idle most of the time. What’s the utilization on your document processing system?”

The silence told me everything. Someone finally mumbled, “It processes batches twice a day. It takes about an hour each time.”

“So you’re paying for 24 hours of compute to do 2 hours of work?”

The room got quiet. Then the lead architect, defensive but curious, said, “Well, what else are we supposed to do? The application needs to be available.”

“Actually,” one of the younger engineers piped up, ...