Case study
Cutting data costs without losing trust
Leading a cost taskforce and a leadership workshop that cut data warehouse spend by about a quarter.
Context
Data warehouse costs needed to come down. GCP raised their on-demand costs by 25%.
Challenge
Cutting costs meant deciding what to stop doing. Nobody wanted to lose the data their work depended on.
Approach
- Formed and led a cost reduction taskforce.
- Facilitated a three-day workshop with leadership to agree which datasets were truly mission-critical.
- Turned the result into a three-month deprecation plan, so nothing disappeared by surprise.
- Ran a deep-dive in GCP’s billing models for BigQuery, wrote custom queries to predict our usage on different plans, coordinated with engineers from Google to better improve their cost monitoring.
Outcome
Instead of a 25% increase of our warehouse costs, we saved 23% over six months.
What I learned
Cost cutting is a trust exercise. Once people helped decide what mattered, letting go of the rest got much easier.