We're facing a massive $600K+ monthly bill from AWS and GCP, and while our finance team has created some impressive dashboards, the reality is that our engineers just don't engage with them. Traditional solutions like tagging resources, setting up alerts, and those endlessly dull weekly cost review meetings have failed to resonate with the team.
Here's the crux: if the cost information isn't integrated into the tools that developers are already using, it practically doesn't exist for them. I'm on the hunt for innovative solutions that can embed cost visibility directly into engineering workflows. I'm not looking for more emails or recommendations like 'hey, you might want to resize that instance.' Instead, I'm thinking along the lines of:
* A Slack bot that alerts you when your pull request is about to hit the budget hard
* Automatically generated Jira tickets for those forgotten 'zombie' instances
* Cost impact information integrated right into Datadog while you're troubleshooting issues at 2 am
We need something better than a separate dashboard; we need cost metrics to appear where developers actually spend their time. Has anyone managed to tackle this challenge, or are we all just living in a world where finance emails are considered adequate?
5 Answers
I developed a tool that visualizes costs in a fun way. It shows my team how much we’re spending on certain actions, kind of like the 'Soldier meme' where they see 'It costs $400,000 to fire this gun for 12 seconds.' Their manager needs to approve these costs through a Slack notification, which keeps everyone accountable without blocking their workflow. It's a way to make them face the reality of spending!
One of the biggest challenges is motivation. Developers often don’t have any incentives to manage costs effectively. In a sense, it's like that scene from Office Space—if they don’t see a direct benefit, they just won’t care enough to change their habits. If they spend time cutting costs, it takes away from other tasks that are important to their stakeholders. That’s a tough balance to strike!
A big part of the problem may be that developers often don't feel accountable for costs. It doesn't matter how great the tools are if developers see no personal gain in monitoring costs—especially if it doesn’t impact promotions or raises. Since cost management is not part of their performance reviews, they might just zone out. Changing the culture around cost ownership could help significantly!
Exactly! Once devs are made to consider costs at every step, they’re likely to engage more with the tooling.
If devs aren't aware of the costs they’re incurring, they shouldn't have unlimited access to resources. Adopting a developer platform that limits usage while also providing oversight could save your company a lot of money in the long run. For the kind of waste you’re facing, investing $50K to streamline usage could pay off quickly!
I set up cost estimates directly in Terraform with infrafcosts, and having that in pull requests was pretty handy! However, it’s still up to the team to manage resource cleanup. If they forget to destroy instances, they won’t notice those charges until it’s too late. This isn’t a full solve, but it helps!
Totally agree! Getting that accountability within the team is crucial. If they see it affecting their reviews, they'll start taking it more seriously.