Cloud Cost Engineering

Reading the Bill

A practitioner's guide to decoding AWS line items, untangling allocation, and surfacing the hidden services that silently drain your budget.

Tags, Tags, Tags

Build a tag taxonomy that actually works — enforcement, retroactive cleanup, and making sure the bill always knows who owns what.

Compute: Rightsizing and Graviton

How to systematically identify oversized instances, run the ARM migration math, and capture Graviton savings without breaking production.

Storage Tiers

Match data temperature to the right S3 storage class and EBS volume type, then automate lifecycle transitions to keep costs in check without manual intervention.

Data Transfer: The Silent Killer

Egress fees, cross-AZ charges, and NAT Gateway costs are invisible until they dominate your bill — here is how to find them and fix them.

Kubernetes Cost Visibility

Get per-namespace, per-team cost allocation out of your Kubernetes clusters using OpenCost and Kubecost — without guessing which pod owns which dollar.

Spot, Savings Plans, RIs

Know when each AWS pricing model fits your workload, run the commitment math, and build a coverage strategy that maximizes savings without overcommitting.

Multi-Cloud Accounting

Normalize costs across AWS, GCP, and Azure into a single model using the FOCUS specification — so you can make apples-to-apples decisions without a spreadsheet war.

Showback vs Chargeback

Build engineering accountability for cloud spend without turning cost reviews into finance theater — and know when each model actually changes behavior.

Cost as an SLO

Treat your cloud budget like a reliability budget — define burn rates, wire budget alerts into your incident workflow, and make cost a first-class engineering constraint.