Engineering
Cloud costs creep for boring reasons. Here are the four biggest
Idle environments, oversized instances, forgotten snapshots and cross-region traffic. None of it is exotic, all of it is expensive.
· INFINITCORE IT
Cloud bills rarely explode because of one glamorous architecture mistake. They grow because nobody owned the boring leftovers.
Idle non-production environments that run all week for a two-hour demo. Instances sized for a peak that happened once last year. Snapshots and volumes attached to projects that shipped and were never torn down. Data transferred across regions because "default" was easier than thinking.
The fix is ownership more than clever tooling: tag resources, schedule non-prod shutdowns, review rightsizing monthly, and make delete/archive part of the definition of done.
If finance only sees the invoice and engineering only sees the dashboard, the gap between them is where the money goes. Put a name next to each environment, and a date when it should die if nobody claims it.
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