Engineers are good at building and innovating, but keeping track of AWS pricing plans is a whole different story. And should even they have to? We’re joined by JT Giri and Andrew Lewis to discuss why long-term spending commitments are so challenging for engineers.

Commitments can last 2-3 years, and they’re bucketed by the hour. We’ll dive into common misconceptions, pitfalls, and all the ways it can get complicated. Ever found yourself locked into openSearch when Databricks and Druid comes along? We’ll share advice for what you should do and how to avoid backing yourself into a corner.

Plus, we’ll talk through what to do when the CFO’s yelling and management comes along to demands cuts. What tools do you have at your disposal to do that? We’ll share some battle stories of what we did when facing the heat, what went right, what went wrong, and what you can learn from it.

And the essential question: how do you free engineers from the shackles of all this complexity so they can make great things? Spoiler alert: there’s a game-changer in the mix.

We get into advanced tooling like RI automation, Spot automation, variable workloads and hacks for doing it easy.