Five habits that keep cloud costs predictable

Every resource should carry tags for owner, environment and project. Without tags, nobody can say who is responsible for a line on the bill.

All major providers let you set budgets with email alerts. Set them per project and per environment so problems show up early.

Development and test environments rarely need to run overnight or at weekends. Scheduled shutdowns are one of the easiest savings available.

Instances are often sized for a launch that never needed that capacity. Review utilisation monthly and resize where usage is consistently low.

Reserved capacity and savings plans can lower costs for steady workloads. Commit only once usage has been stable for a while.