Cloud Cost Problems? Let’s fix it | CloudYali | Cloud Cost Visibility | Cost Management | FinOps
"We need to cut cloud costs by 30%." The room went quiet. Then everyone started talking at once. Engineering: "We'll need to refactor half our services." Finance: "Just turn off what we don't need." Product: "But that'll impact our roadmap!" The new Efficiency Team: "Let us analyze everything first." Three months later? Costs were up 10%. Because while everyone was arguing about who owned the problem, nobody was solving it. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗽. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀. Think about it. Who owns product quality? Engineering writes quality code. QA tests it. Product defines acceptable standards. Customer Success handles complaints. Everyone owns their piece. Yet with cloud costs, we keep searching for one owner. One throat to choke. One dashboard to rule them all. I learned this lesson the hard way at a scaling startup. We tried everything: 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟭: "Engineering owns costs" They optimized beautifully. Rightosized instances, cleaned up storage, implemented auto-scaling. Then Product launched a data-heavy feature. Costs exploded. Engineering threw up their hands: "We optimized our part!" 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟮: "FinOps owns it" They negotiated great discounts, built cost allocation, sent weekly reports. But they couldn't fix that expensive architecture pattern. Or stop teams from spinning up GPU instances for experiments. 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟯: "Create an Efficiency Team" Smart people. Great analysis. Found $500K in waste. But their recommendations? "Use smaller instances" (Engineering: "That'll impact performance"). "Delay that feature" (Product: "That'll impact revenue"). Then we tried something different. Instead of one owner, we created clear swim lanes: • Engineering owns HOW we build (architecture efficiency) • Product owns WHAT we build (value vs cost tradeoffs) • FinOps owns VISIBILITY (making costs understandable) • Finance owns CONSTRAINTS (budgets and forecasts) The breakthrough? We started including cost in every decision: • Architecture reviews included cost impact • Feature planning included unit economics • Sprint retros included efficiency metrics • OKRs included cost targets relevant to each team Results? Cloud costs dropped 35% while revenue grew 300%. Not because we found an owner, but because we stopped looking for one. The companies winning at cloud economics don't have a cost optimization owner. They have a cost optimization culture. Where every deploy considers efficiency. Every feature considers margins. Every dashboard includes context. Because here's the truth: In the cloud, cost isn't someone's job. It's a property of everyone's job. Like security. Like performance. Like quality. The question isn't "who owns cloud costs?" The question is "how do we make cost awareness as natural as code reviews?" What's working in your organization? Single owner or distributed responsibility? #FinOps #CloudCostOptimization #CloudEconomics #