How to Ensure Cost Accountability in Cloud Computing

How I Cut Cloud Costs by $300K+ Annually: 3 Real FinOps Wins When leadership asked me to “figure out why our cloud bill keeps growing Here’s how I turned cost chaos into controlled savings: Case #1: The $45K Monthly Reality Check The Problem: Inherited a runaway AWS environment - $45K/month with zero oversight My Approach: ✅ 30-day CloudWatch deep dive revealed 40% of instances at <20% utilization ✅ Right-sized over-provisioned resources ✅ Implemented auto-scaling for variable workloads ✅ Strategic Reserved Instance purchases for predictable loads ✅ Automated dev/test environment scheduling (nights/weekends off) Impact: 35% cost reduction = $16K monthly savings Case #2: Multi-Cloud Mayhem The Problem: AWS + Azure teams spending independently = duplicate everything My Strategy: ✅ Unified cost allocation tagging across both platforms ✅ Centralized dashboards showing spend by department/project ✅ Monthly stakeholder cost reviews ✅ Eliminated duplicate services (why run 2 databases for 1 app?) ✅ Negotiated enterprise discounts through consolidated commitments Impact: 28% overall reduction while improving DR capabilities Case 3: Storage Spiral Control The Problem: 20% quarterly storage growth, 60% of data untouched for 90+ days in expensive hot storage My Solution: 1, Comprehensive data lifecycle analysis 2, Automated tiering policies (hot → warm → cold → archive) 3, Business-aligned data retention policies 4, CloudFront optimization for frequent access 5, Geographic workload repositioning 6, Monthly department storage reporting for accountability Impact: $8K monthly storage savings + 45% bandwidth cost reduction ----- The Meta-Lesson: Total Annual Savings: $300K+ The real win wasn’t just the money - it was building a cost-conscious culture** where: - Teams understand their cloud spend impact - Automated policies prevent cost drift - Business stakeholders make informed decisions - Performance actually improved through better resource allocation My Go-To FinOps Stack: - Monitoring: CloudWatch, Azure Monitor - Optimization: AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor - Automation: Lambda functions for policy enforcement - Reporting: Custom dashboards + monthly business reviews - Culture: Showback reports that make costs visible The biggest insight? Most “cloud cost problems” are actually visibility and accountability problems in disguise. What’s your biggest cloud cost challenge right now? Drop it in the comments - happy to share specific strategies! 👇 FinOps #CloudCosts #AWS #Azure #CostOptimization #DevOps #CloudEngineering P.S. : If your monthly cloud bill makes you nervous, you’re not alone. These strategies work at any scale.

Imagine you’re filling a bucket from what seems like a free-flowing stream, only to discover that the water is metered and every drop comes with a price tag. That’s how unmanaged cloud spending can feel. Scaling operations is exciting, but it often comes with a hidden challenge of increased cloud costs. Without a solid approach, these expenses can spiral out of control. Here are important strategies to manage your cloud spending: ✅ Implement Resource Tagging → Resource tagging, or labeling, is important to organize and manage cloud costs. → Tags help identify which teams, projects, or features are driving expenses, simplify audits, and enable faster troubleshooting. → Adopt a tagging strategy from day 1, categorizing resources based on usage and accountability. ✅ Control Autoscaling → Autoscaling can optimize performance, but if unmanaged, it may generate excessive costs. For instance, unexpected traffic spikes or bugs can trigger excessive resource allocation, leading to huge bills. → Set hard limits on autoscaling to prevent runaway resource usage. ✅ Leverage Discount Programs (reserved, spot, preemptible) → For predictable workloads, reserve resources upfront. For less critical processes, explore spot or preemptible Instances. ✅ Terminate Idle Resources → Unused resources, such as inactive development and test environments or abandoned virtual machines (VMs), are a common source of unnecessary spending. → Schedule automatic shutdowns for non-essential systems during off-hours. ✅ Monitor Spending Regularly → Track your expenses daily with cloud monitoring tools. → Set up alerts for unusual spending patterns, such as sudden usage spikes or exceeding your budgets. ✅ Optimize Architecture for Cost Efficiency → Every architectural decision impacts your costs. → Prioritize services that offer the best balance between performance and cost, and avoid over-engineering. Cloud cost management isn’t just about cutting back, it’s about optimizing your spending to align with your goals. Start with small, actionable steps, like implementing resource tagging and shutting down idle resources, and gradually develop a comprehensive, automated cost-control strategy. How do you manage your cloud expenses?

We helped ClickUp reduce its cloud cost by 20%. As CEO of Yotascale, here’s my take on how we did it and what it meant to the ClickUp team: The first step? Visibility. As the engineering manager said, “Yotascale gave us laser focus on regional and platform service cost optimization.” Without visibility, you can’t measure costs; without measurement, optimization is impossible. We helped simplify what seemed complex by breaking down their cloud spending across teams and services. Yotascale helped draw lines of accountability and ownership for ClickUp. But visibility alone isn’t enough. Ultimately, what made our collaboration work was ClickUp’s culture of accountability. See, culture isn’t something we inject. Our product can only empower companies that are cloud cost-conscious, empower teams to take ownership of their cloud costs, and see cloud cost as a KPI. In addition, ClickUp was an early adopter of Yotascale's Yota Copilot, our GenAI-powered tool designed specifically for FinOps. The same engineering manager shared how it reduced the time he spent on cloud cost management from 10 hours a week to just 20 minutes. That’s 9 hours and 40 minutes freed up for high-value tasks. Nobody else in the market is doing that today. Finally, it’s about scaling with confidence. Their team described Yotascale as “the only solution tough enough to handle our sprawling enterprise cloud.” We helped ClickUp when they were growing fast—new teams, services, applications and more. By giving them X-ray vision into every corner of their tech stack, we helped them shift from being *reactive* to *proactive*. No more knee-jerk reactions like, “You’re spending too much, cut costs in half.” Instead, we enabled them to understand why high cloud spend happens and leave room to address it thoughtfully. A culture of collaboration replaced friction. ClickUp is now a shining example of strategic FinOps. They’ve moved past reactive decisions, adopted self-service tools, and built a collaborative approach to cloud cost management that saves money and time. The result? 20% savings on cloud costs.

It's astonishing that $180 billion of the nearly $600 billion on cloud spend globally is entirely unnecessary. For companies to save millions, they need to focus on these 3 principles — visibility, accountability, and automation. 1) Visibility The very characteristics that make the cloud so convenient also make it difficult to track and control how much teams and individuals spend on cloud resources. Most companies still struggle to keep budgets aligned. The good news is that a new generation of tools can provide transparency. For example: resource tagging to automatically track which teams use cloud resources to measure costs and identify excess capacity accurately. 2) Accountability Companies wouldn't dare deploy a payroll budget without an administrator to optimize spend carefully. Yet, when it comes to cloud costs, there's often no one at the helm. Enter the emerging disciplines of FinOps or cloud operations. These dedicated teams can take responsibility of everything from setting cloud budgets and negotiating favorable controls to putting engineering discipline in place to control costs. 3) Automation Even with a dedicated team monitoring cloud use and need, automation is the only way to keep up with the complex and evolving scenarios. Much of today's cloud cost management remains bespoke and manual, In many cases, a monthly report or round-up of cloud waste is the only maintenance done — and highly paid engineers are expected to manually remove abandoned projects and initiatives to free up space. It’s the equivalent of asking someone to delete extra photos from their iPhone each month to free up extra storage. That’s why AI and automation are critical to identify cloud waste and eliminate it. For example: tools like "intelligent auto-stopping" allow users to stop their cloud instances when not in use, much like motion sensors can turn off a light switch at the end of the workday. As cloud management evolves, companies are discovering ways to save millions, if not hundreds of millions — and these 3 principles are key to getting cloud costs under control.

Post 14: Real-Time Cloud & DevOps Scenario Scenario: Your team manages a multi-cloud architecture where workloads are deployed across AWS and Azure. Recently, you noticed discrepancies in cost allocation and performance monitoring due to inconsistent tagging of cloud resources. This lack of standardization is causing inefficiencies in governance and billing.As a DevOps engineer, your task is to implement a unified resource tagging strategy to streamline cost management and resource tracking across clouds. Step-by-Step Solution: Define a Tagging Policy: Establish a standard naming convention for tags across AWS and Azure. Common tags include: Environment: prod, dev, staging. Owner: Responsible team or individual. Application: Associated app or service name. CostCenter: For billing and budgeting. Implement Resource Tagging Automation: Use AWS Tag Editor and Azure Policy to enforce consistent tagging on new resources.Automate tagging during resource creation using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or CloudFormation. Example for Terraform: hcl Copy code tags = { Environment = "prod" Owner = "DevOpsTeam" Application = "EcommerceApp" } Audit and Enforce Tag Compliance: Use AWS Config and Azure Resource Graph to audit existing resources for missing or inconsistent tags.Set up policies to deny the creation of resources that do not adhere to the tagging standards. Enable Cost Allocation Reports: Configure AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Management to generate cost reports based on tags. Group costs by tags such as CostCenter and Application for better insights. Use Cross-Cloud Tagging Tools: Leverage tools like CloudHealth or Spot by NetApp for centralized visibility and management of tags across multiple cloud platforms. Educate Teams on Tagging Practices: Conduct training sessions to ensure all team members understand the importance of tagging and how to follow the standards. Share tagging templates and guidelines. Monitor and Automate Alerts for Non-Compliance: Use AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor to set up alerts for resources created without tags or with incorrect tags.Automate remediation scripts to update or add missing tags. Periodically Review and Update Tags: Schedule periodic reviews to ensure tags remain relevant as projects and teams evolve.Update tagging policies as business needs change. Outcome: Streamlined resource tracking and cost allocation across AWS and Azure. Improved governance and compliance with reduced manual intervention. 💬 How do you manage resource tagging in multi-cloud environments? Let’s share best practices in the comments! ✅ Follow Thiruppathi Ayyavoo for daily real-time scenarios in Cloud and DevOps. Let’s grow and succeed together! #DevOps #CloudComputing #MultiCloud #AWS #Azure #ResourceTagging #CostManagement #RealTimeScenarios #CloudEngineering #TechSolutions #LinkedInLearning #careerbytecode #thirucloud #linkedin #USA CareerByteCode

Well researched article by Robert Mitchell on CIO.com. "#FinOps finally became ubiquitous across the enterprise landscape...with 75% of Forbes’ Global 2000 companies now all-in": https://lnkd.in/gEBws463 "Having established its bona fides as a key methodology for cost control and workload optimization of public cloud services, FinOps is expanding into optimizing outcomes for private cloud, SaaS, licensing, AI, and even traditional data centers." "And while the maturity of those practices varies, large organizations at the forefront of FinOps are scaling up and out, driving the cloud optimization practice into new areas of IT, including as a way to get a handle on spiraling AI costs." Jeff Wysocki, CIO at mining firm Mosaic, recently hired his first full-time FinOps professional. “We’re 80 to 85% in the cloud and for us, the job is proactively tracking this spend, then educating developers and data teams on how to use cloud capabilities in a cost-effective manner,” he says. "By contrast, in some large financial services firms, the role of FinOps has broadened. “We’re moving FinOps practices into larger scopes of vendors,” says Jennifer Hays, SVP and head of engineering excellence and accessibility at Fidelity Investments. “We’re looking more at SaaS and PaaS, and our enterprise technology organization is trying to utilize some of the same principles for our on-premises data centers.” "And for Shamim Mohammad, NACD.DC, EVP and CITO at used car retailer CarMax, FinOps helps provide spend oversight. “Now we have a more granular understanding of our spending,” he says. “It provides transparency and drives accountability.” And its FinOps principles aren’t limited to public cloud or SaaS. “Most FinOps principles have been applied to technology financials as a whole,” he adds. "Today, as CEO of SaaS provider DoubleCheck, Ashwin Rangan feels the push and pull between what his customers pay, and forecasting how that’ll affect the company’s CSP charges on the back end. It’s all up to his head of product to figure that out. “I wouldn’t say we have complete control, but we can see what’s being provisioned, and when and what levers there are we can toggle,” he says. “Total cost of ownership is done by the individual teams,” says FINRA’s Tigran Khrimian. “Our operation in the center is there to develop best practices and tools to assist delivery teams. We built competencies in the center with an eye toward enabling individual teams to adopt and own them.” "So FinOps practices focus on both FinOps for AI — the optimization of AI usage — and AI for FinOps — leveraging AI to advance FinOps practices. Efforts to apply FinOps to AI are still in the early stages since the ways in which CSPs charge for AI continues to evolve." Read more: https://lnkd.in/gEBws463 From CIO Online FinOps Foundation

The #1 problem I see in cloud cost management? Nobody knows who’s spending what. Finance sees a giant bill. Engineering sees… nothing. This gap leads to: - Unused resources running 24/7 - Teams with no idea what they’re spending - Anomalies caught too late If you want to control costs, start here: 1. Require proper tagging (and enforce it) 2. Show teams their slice of the bill 3. Align costs to products, teams, environments Visibility isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of accountability. You can’t fix what you can’t see.