Google has a neat internal website called “Rules of Thumb”, which compares the marginal cost of computational resources to the unit of a “SWE”. “SWE” refers to “Software Engineer” – which itself is the marginal cost to pay salary and benefits to the average engineer at the company. Throughout design docs at the company, you’ll see costs referred to in the units of SWE. For example, “deploying service <X> at 1000QPS will cost ~100 SWEs in resources”. I always thought comparing costs of fixed asse...