Frugality Questions

Question 1

Tell me about a time when you had to work with limited time or resources.

Answer 1

Situation
This goes back to the time when I was a senior software architect in AICPA. My customers were almost moving to the cloud. We were developing Azure functions for microservices and communicating each service using Azure Service Bus, a messaging framework ASB. Business had purchased ASB service and for each namespace the charges were very high. We have 20 developers and for each one of them in order to develop they needed a new namespace. Business was worried about how to solve this because it was becoming very costly. Our budget was to not spend more than $10,000 per month on dev/test

Tag: ASB Messaging Cost Saving
Task
I decided to solve this issue and come up with an innovative idea to save customer cost.
Actions
I researched the ASB messaging topology and tried to understand the architecture.
I came up with the Bundle Topic concept where every developer will create a bundle topic with their name and the entire microservices that he will be running will subscribe to that unique topic name.
This way we created 20 new topics and queues within a single ASB namespace and ASB had a limit of 10,000 topics within a single namespace. That was enough for us.
Results
All developers were able to work on single Basic subscription namespace for ASB
Businesses were able to save their 20 namespace cost; each namespace was expected to give them $1000 per developer per month cost. 20 users, 5 environments I saved around $25000 (= 20 * $1000 + 5 x $1000 ) per month
This saved our customers’ budget and I received good feedback from my CFO in my next monthly architect meeting.

Question 2

Describe a time when you had to manage a budget (or manage time/money/resources/etc.). Were you able to get more out of less?

Answer 2

Situation
This goes back to the time when I was a senior software architect in AICPA. My customers were almost moving to the cloud. We were developing Azure functions for microservices and communicating each service using Azure Service Bus, a messaging framework ASB. Business had purchased a Basic Web app plan. We have 5 environments in dev/test. Budget was $5,000 per month on dev/test. Plus we had 10-20 POCs to be done on a web app. We had exhausted the free plan. In the past other teams had already created 2-3 plans for just POC and were over budget.

Tag: ASB Messaging Cost Saving
Task
I decided to solve this financial issue for azure web app
Actions
I researched the Web application plan
Found we can create many web applications under the same plan. We can create many azure function apps on the same web app plan.
I created DEV, QA, NAP, POC, SANDBOX environments as just web apps with the same plan and tested them.
Results
Before total expected budget was showing $10,000 per month over than $5000
1 plan $2000 cost average
3 plan used to go $6000 per month
5 plans (DEV, QA, NAP, POC, SANDBOX) = $10,000 (saved)
Now after my changes it is showing $700 saving per month as per our budget.
Also future POCs can be now just done within same plan it was going to be 20 POC expected ( 20*$2000 = $40,000 per month saved)

Question 3

Tell me about a time where you thought of a new way to save money for the company.

Answer 3

Situation
AICPA had ewing and durham 2 datacenters, ewing primary and durham for DR. We already moved our ewing dc to cloud and we had set up DR to still durham data center with 10 servers ( 6 web, 2 db and 2 domain controller) we had rpo 15 min, rto 48 hours
Task
Decided to save our customer cost
Actions
Researched on cloud dr strategies, found there are 4 strategies ( manual backup, warm , pilot, active active ) based on our RPO RTO warm DR setup was suited
I proposed one plan to my product owners, CTO and CFO
The current Durham datacenter DR has become unstable. We were about to move out of Durham to some other datacenter. I proposed instead we can move to azure cloud with site recovery options that is best
Results
Maintain same RTO , RPO
Eliminate Transaction log shipping for sql servers
Remove raven db replication and reduce the need for a separate DR raven DB license ( per server $8000 enterprise edition)
Simplify our current DR solution
Test DR failover on a regular basis.
We shut down the Durham data center and saved on-premise per year $200,000 per year. In cloud $11, 310 per year with DR enabled. For 10 servers. I saved $180,000 per year.