What Is the Goal of Lowering Your TCO Anyway?

More focus, not fewer people

Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash

TCO is an acronym that is fairly regularly brought up in conversations about serverless.

It stands for Total Cost of Ownership, and it is used (correctly, in my view) to direct people’s attention to the costs of “owning” some piece of software or infrastructure that could instead be managed by a cloud provider.

But it is easily misunderstood as a way to just cut down on headcount. In other words, “Pay AWS a little bit more to manage things for you, and get rid of a bunch of unnecessary people”.

But that’s a really horrible argument. Aside from not being particularly persuasive, it misses the target completely.