Intro
Nobody migrates to the public cloud to end up spending more. But for many organizations, that’s exactly what happens. Even so, the root causes of overspending frequently remain under-examined by cloud customers. In this Level Up Cloud Cost Management Practice post, we explore the “psychology” of cloud spend, why developer autonomy can inadvertently lead to financial waste, and how your Cloud Operations team can begin regaining control of your monthly cloud bill… without reducing the speed of mission-critical corporate innovation.
The Illusion of Infinitely-Elastic Cloud Resources
The cloud promised us elasticity: pay for what you use, scale whenever you need, even “go global in minutes”. But all too often in Level Up’s experience, by the time we start helping our clients, that same Day 1 elasticity has become an everyday double-edged sword. Because without clear guardrails, engineering teams may unconsciously treat the cloud like a buffet with endlessly refillable platters. We’re talking about orphaned EBS volumes hanging around for months, GPU-backed instances running idle overnight, not to mention those constant cross-region data transfers happening for no great reason.
Psychologically, it’s a lot like using a corporate credit card. When someone else is managing the autopay, we don’t “feel” the cost. And in a high-velocity engineering culture, no one wants to be the person slowing down experimentation just to pinch what seems like pennies.
Financial Entropy: When Autonomy Becomes Chaos
It’s a legitimate challenge for cloud-first organizations of all sizes: developer autonomy is awesome for velocity… but also often terrible for cloud economics. Unless you have alignment.
In traditional infrastructure, provisioning means paperwork, approvals, and IT controls. In the cloud though, it’s often just terraform apply. Multiply that across dozens of teams, each with their own mental model of what “reasonable” usage looks like, and you end up with entropy by definition: budget decay as a natural side effect of all that freedom.
But this isn’t really a cloud discipline problem. It’s more of a “FinOps strategy just waiting to be implemented” problem. And happily, one that’s typically easy enough to begin solving, especially if you’re working with a consulting practice which is deeply knowledgeable of both the many opportunities and the hidden trapdoors of cloud cost optimization.
How to Regain Control, Without Becoming the Cloud Police
You don’t need to become heavy-handed to fix your cloud. Having to say “no” by default all the time is probably why you ended up leaving your legacy datacenter in the first place. However, beyond simply “being in the cloud”, becoming truly cloud native means having operational visibility, accountability, and incentives that match your engineering culture.
Here are a few highlights of what Level Up has seen work well in the field:
- Tagging Everything: Mandate cost allocation tags by team, service, and environment. Better yet? Automate tagging at the IaC layer (Red Hat® Ansible works great everywhere, but it often shines brightest for customers in public cloud).
- Setting Budget Expectations Upfront: Treat every team’s cloud account budget like a reliability SLA. What’s the expected cost per environment, per deployment, and per customer? And then socialize those numbers across teams if at all possible. What we find is that the highest-functioning orgs are maximally transparent with their core metrics.
- Showing the Waste: Build internal dashboards or Slack alerts that flag things like zombie instances, idle containers, or other massive cost anomalies. Nobody likes being called out. But nobody wants to be that team either.
- Adopting FinOps Sprints: Just like tech debt sprints, carve out regular time to optimize. This can’t be a one-time cleanup, it needs to become a consistent cloud hygiene habit. Because there’s a huge difference between truly investing in the cloud and simply spending in the cloud.
- Making Cloud Spend a Team KPI: No, not to punish anybody, but rather to gamify everybody. Track cost per feature or per user…. and celebrate cost improvements by team or lead. We’re guessing that you’ll find that suddenly, engineers will start genuinely acting like the cloud resource owners they have been all along.
The Mindset Shift: From Cost Center to Innovation Center
At root, cloud cost isn’t simply a problem for you to solve, it’s also a signal for you to decode. What you’re spending in the cloud tells you what your teams value, where your architecture may be showing its age, and possibly even which parts of your org aren’t talking to each other as often as they probably should be.
As they say: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Being able to manage your cloud usage “from the budget, down” is a huge step toward changing the tired narrative of IT as a cost center to being IT as an innovation center. Seriously, the very best engineering orgs we’ve seen? They know exactly what each cloud dollar is buying them. And where to ultimately cut costs with precision, not panic.
Final Thoughts
If your cloud budget “feels wrong”, it’s often more of a prioritization and coordination issue than a tagging and chargeback issue. If you can optimize and rightsize for that, your spend becomes a strategic lever to pull, not a monthly source of cloud billing dread you wish you could push away.
Want to get started?
Show us your public cloud bill. We’ll show you 5 things you probably didn’t know about it: cloudcostmgmt@levelupla.io.
Level Up’s Cloud Cost Management Practice turns cloud spend into clarity, and clarity into confidence.