How Stack Overflow Cut Cloud Spend by 40 Percent

Episode notes

Stack Overflow runs one of the web's largest Q&A platforms, yet in 2025 its cloud bill was spiraling. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack how the engineering team turned a cost crisis into a 40 percent cloud-spend reduction, using a mix of workload re-platforming, smarter caching, and a hard look at reserved instances. They break down the specific moves: moving read-heavy traffic to a Postgres replica farm, cutting cold-start waste with pre-warmed Lambda functions, and negotiating a private pricing deal with a cloud provider. They also get into the human side - how cost became a first-class engineering metric, with monthly FinOps reviews and a 'cost per request' dashboard that changed how teams shipped. If you're running any service at scale, this episode is a masterclass in treating your cloud bill like a product, not a back-office line item. #CloudCostOptimization #FinOps #StackOverflow #Postgres #AWSLambda #ReservedInstances #EngineeringLeadership #CostPerRequest #Architecture #TechLeadership #Business #Technology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #CTOPodcast #CloudSpend #Scale #WebInfrastructure Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

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