Mystery of the Rising Cloud Bill
A team discovers their monthly cloud bill jumped 40%, but no one knows which service or team caused it.
What is cost visibility / tagging?
A dev environment is left running all weekend because no one remembered to shut it down.
What is scheduled automation?
Finance and engineering argue constantly because finance sees only total spend, while engineers focus only on performance.
What is FinOps collaboration (cross-functional alignment)?
A storage bucket has 200 TB of data that hasn’t been accessed in 18 months. No one knows if it’s safe to delete.
What is data lifecycle management?
A team accidentally deploys a large instance type instead of a small one, and no alert fires until the bill arrives.
What is cost anomaly detection/alerts?
A team buys a 3‑year commitment but only uses 60% of it because workloads changed.
What is commitment management?
A VM cluster is running at 5% CPU for months because “we might need it someday.
What is rightsizing & usage optimization?
A team launches a new service, but two months later they are told it’s “too expensive” and must redesign it.
What is cost-aware architecture?
Leadership wants to know the cost of each application or program, but the cloud bill is one giant blob.
What is showback/chargeback?