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 spent about two decades in security before starting CloudZero in 2016, and he is known for the line “every engineering decision is a buying decision.”

Two decades in security

His early jobs included IT work at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, followed by information security roles at Moody’s and SunTrust. He also worked at security software companies including Sanctum, SPI Dynamics, and HP, and became director of technology strategy at Veracode, an application security company.

A $3,000 budget at Veracode

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.”

Million-dollar lines of code

In conference talks he treats runaway cloud cost as a software defect. One example he shows involves DynamoDB, Amazon’s database service, which bills writes in 1 KB units: adding a single timestamp field pushed each record just past that limit and doubled the cost of every write. “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.