Cloud costs: where the money disappears

Finding the waste

Machines in test environments running at night and on weekends; disks and images left after deletions; logs kept forever; and load balancers and addresses not in use.

Tagging resources by owner and environment is the prerequisite for everything else. Without tagging, you can't ask who this resource belongs to.

Three quick actions

Automatic shutdown for non-production environments; a lifecycle policy for storage and logs; and right-sizing by actual consumption rather than an initial guess.

A commitment to steady usage lowers cost significantly — but only after usage has stabilized.

Transparency

Attach cost to a business unit: cost per user, per order, per inquiry. Such a number turns a budget discussion from an apology into an analysis, and lets you know whether growth pays off.