A practical checklist for cloud cost management

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time cloud cost management comes up.

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them
• Tag everything so cost maps to a team or a product
• Idle non-production environments are the usual first saving
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What this looks like day to day

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
• Idle non-production environments are the usual first saving — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.