9 min read
The one-off saving is the easy part
Rightsizing, deleting orphaned volumes, buying commitments against a stable baseline — these are well-understood and genuinely worth doing. They also decay, because the conditions that created the waste are still in place.
Durable cost control comes from attribution and feedback: every resource has an owner, every owner sees their spend, and the cost of a design decision is visible at the time it is made rather than in a quarterly review.
What to put in place
- Tagging enforced by policy — untagged resources fail deployment, not a report
- Showback before chargeback, so teams see their spend before they are billed for it
- Commitment coverage tracked as a rolling metric, not an annual purchase
- Environment lifecycle automation — non-production that stops outside working hours
- Unit economics: cost per transaction, per tenant, per pipeline run
Where AI helps and where it does not
Anomaly detection on spend is genuinely useful — it catches the runaway job on the day it starts rather than at month end. Automated rightsizing recommendations are useful when they account for workload seasonality and dangerous when they do not. Neither substitutes for ownership.