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 (nOps CEO) and Andrew Lewis (nOps Principal Cloud Optimization Architect) 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 come 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 demand 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.