I work in a team that uses quite a lot of AWS for various reasons beyond cost. We also use various other clouds too, depending on needs of a specific project or situation. Our experience with cloud is that it is a journey. Obviously, coupled with DevOps tooling, it’d allowed us to deal with environment requirements at the speed of software, i.e. Infrastructure as Code and all. One thing we find ourselves doing over and over is changing the infrastructure, either because requirements change, new cloud services are launched and its useful to us or simply because we find more efficient ways of running cloud resources (Trusted Advisor helps).<p>We’d built a tool called Liquid Sky (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liquidsky.singtel-labs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liquidsky.singtel-labs.com</a>) to help us keep track of the cost impact of the changes we make constantly. I did mention that we use cloud for reasons beyond cost, but we definitely still want to know that we’re sensible and maximise cost efficiency as well, its just another (important) factor. Because we change our cloud resources so frequently, we didn’t want to make it a very rigid process when dealing with the sensibilities of cloud cost. Hence, we’d built Liquid Sky in a way that gives our engineers the freedom to explore better way of running things on the cloud while keeping cost in check as well as keeping the team (including cost guardians) in the loop.