Cloud bills have a way of creeping up. The good news: most of that spend is recoverable without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Start with visibility. Tag every resource and attribute costs to teams. You cannot optimise what you cannot attribute. Next, right-size — most workloads are massively over-provisioned.
Use autoscaling and spot instances for fault-tolerant workloads, and reserve capacity for predictable baselines. Together these routinely cut bills by 30–40%.
Finally, build cost into your engineering culture. A small dashboard showing daily spend changes behaviour more than any policy document.