Cloud cost management: the questions we get asked most

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The questions about cloud cost management that come up most often on our calls.

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.

Do we need to care about this?

Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

Idle non-production environments are the usual first saving. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Three things worth confirming about cloud cost management before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.