What tools are we all using to help drive down AWS costs? And how are you making teams accountable for their cloud expenditure? Currently we're heavily using AWS Cost explorer and recommendations, but is it worth the investment in using something like vantage?

I've had success with Archera, though Vantage's 'single pane of glass' is more mature at the moment.

How is cloud budget managed now? Who owns it? Who does capacity planning and is it automated in any way? How is forecasting accomplished?

I think the ownership question is always interesting. Does the area itself have many teams, which team owns which part ? Should the platform teams ownership reach only towards "we are in charge of unit price" as thats pretty much what we control ? Would be interesting to know how people have gone : Nothing other then AWS; Opencost; SaaS with % of total cost, SaaS with % on actual net savings etc etc Also if someone promises you cost savings x % but in order to achieve that, you should allocate a %, how do you sell that to your stakeholders ? Oh and the most important part, do you calculate HR costs in the picture ? With dedicated engineers, you can always make things cheaper but is it really cheaper 😄

@Erik Past Right. Ownership is how you get the Venn diagram of responsibility and authority to have higher overlap. Every organization I've worked in or consulted for (whether they were big banks or Bob's Bait Shop) that didn't have budget/mission/ownership alignment would go looking for bandaids like cost tracking in shared services after the fact. It's OK to do that as an intermediate step, but it never really gets solved without executive leadership helping drive responsibility/authority alignment so that spend impacts the budget and incentives of the team causing the overburn. Of course, it means that ops and shared services teams have to show value and make it observable to stakeholders, especially in relation to their cost. It's good, since serving stakeholders with features and reliability while showing RoI as a matter of course should be at the core of any platform engineering team's mission. Some Ops, compliance, security, and internal services teams don't like/want to show value and depend on mandates instead. "If you build it, they will come." So there's a balance there, as well. So. If the answer to... • Whose money is it? • Who's the one spending it? ...isn't the same person, then cost tracking and management efforts are doomed to fail over the long haul, putting greater burden on platform teams in the meantime.