Today I was having lunch with our customer and it was mostly about general technology topics. He asked an interesting question about how we can use DevOps engineering to create balance between developers freedom on cloud as well controlling the cost. I was wondering we can always use cloud governance and policies setup to address but how far developer self-service portal justify this problem statement 🙂

This is the great opportunity of Platform Engineering - they can embed cost control into the platform, as with GRC and security. For example, a test environment may be created on demand with a push-button, but also be automatically cleaned after a week.

Definitely time limiting resources (and having the ability to extend) is critical in managing costs. In our particular case, a test env lives about 4 hours unless extended (and our internally developed slack bot will allow the user to extend the time by responding to the warning). The other thing we do is have a looser and separately cost tracked “experimental” cloud account so people can try things without compliance roadblocks, i.e. to try out new AWS service xyz before figuring out how to integrate into the platform.