Cloud bills grow silently because nobody owns them. Our first move is visibility: tagging enforced by policy, dashboards per team, and a weekly cost review that takes fifteen minutes.
The savings ladder is predictable: rightsize instances against real utilization, kill zombie resources and unattached volumes, move steady workloads to savings plans, and push bursty ones to spot or serverless. Storage lifecycle policies quietly recover more than teams expect.
Reliability is the constraint, not the casualty: every change ships behind the same SLOs, and we treat cost per request as an engineering metric alongside latency.