Before you invest in cloud cost management

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on cloud cost management, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Tag everything so cost maps to a team or a product. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Idle non-production environments are the usual first saving. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to tell if yours is fine

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about cloud cost management before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Tag everything so cost maps to a team or a product — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.