Julia Lamenza

Cloud platforms make it easy to ship infrastructure fast, and just as easy to make costly mistakes that inflate bills and hurt reliability. Drawing on real-world SRE experience, this talk walks through the most common and expensive of those mistakes, how they show up in production, and strategies for building systems that are both reliable and cost-efficient.

Cloud costs often only become visible after deployment, once fast-moving teams have already added expensive infrastructure. This talk shows how to shift cost awareness left by embedding FinOps into the development workflow, using Terraform with Infracost to surface cost estimates directly in pull requests so engineers can weigh the financial impact of a change before it ships.

An introduction to OpenCost, an open source tool for tracking and optimising Kubernetes cloud spending. The talk covers how OpenCost works, why cost visibility matters, and how to use it to keep cloud spending under control in real time.

Focusing only on the women who have succeeded in open source hides the many who left or never joined. This talk examines the barriers, from unwelcoming dynamics to recruitment bias and a lack of mentorship, and how they compound for women of colour, LGBTQ+ people and others, then highlights initiatives and practical steps towards more inclusive FOSS communities.