We're paying Professional Services a lot of money to give us generic and mostly useless advice as part of our Cloud Provider Annual Agreement. They say it so often my teammates and I have started making bingo cards for every meeting. If we could have done the simple things, we would have already.

These are the solutions they sold your bosses on, but engineering doesn't think those are priorities. They have requirements from sales to increase footprint to enable that double-digit growth. Pushing everyone to a strictly controlled IAC where every request for new resources has to be approved instead of just spinning up only means you'll be even more over-provisioned "because the process is so slow".

I'll talk about the ways to do effective cost collection, which is going to have a cost. The next level is analysis of that billing data to find you have places where you can turn off unused resources (as well as identifying bursty loads). Finally we'll talk about how to reset expectations with management so that you can still succeed while the number goes up... just not as quickly.