Cloud cost management for small teams

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Most advice about cloud cost management assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

Cloud bills grow quietly until somebody owns them. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to approach it

Idle non-production environments are the usual first saving. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The short version

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

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