Dev management role is now about controlling costs, says Trainline

Trainline head of platform delivery David Stanley explains that if cloud costs start rocketing, development managers will be asked why

The role of the development manager is changing, and is now accountable for costs, according to David Stanley, head of platform delivery at the Trainline (pictured).

Speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit, Stanley began by explaining how cloud costs could begin increasing, and quickly spiral out of control.

"Cloud is an inherently unstable environment for your applications," said Stanley. "I come from infrastructure operational background, and we've known for years that infrastructure hides application errors, you just can't rely on a steady stream of IOPS [Input/Output Operations Per Second, a method of performance measurement]."

He added that in his career he has seen a number of occasions where more corporate funds needed to be invested in purchasing capacity from AWS in order to solve application problems.

"And if you start to see costs increased by a couple of thousand dollars in a month, people start to ask why. So the role of the dev manager is changing to be more accountable for these costs.

"We sit with them every week to ask why we need this many machines, and of that size. Previously, the dev manager wouldn't care about that. So the bigger cultural change to go through after you've made all of your DevOps changes, is to focus on costs."

Stanley said that in his experiene some dev managers have taken well to the new responsibility, whilst some find it to be a burden.

"One manager said he wasn't going to spend time cost saving, someone else should do that for him, and that's just not what we're looking for any more."

Speaking at the same event, Simon Hazlitt, co-founder of financial services firm Majedie Asset Management, explained that the biggest risk of cloud consumption is bankruptcy.