Cloud Cost Visibility & Tagging Overhaul

Context

Applied across two engagements — a 1,200+ engineer public-sector organization running Azure with on-prem infrastructure, and a 20+ person startup running GCP with Hetzner bare-metal/VPS — both with cloud spend that had grown without proper coverage of resource tagging and cost attribution.

Problem

Tagging and cost attribution weren’t properly covered: the public-sector org had some tagging in place but not enough to actually attribute spend, and the startup had no tagging at all. In both cases resources were missing a consistent team, service, or cost-center label, so bills couldn’t be broken down by team or product. Finance had no way to hold teams accountable for spend, and idle or oversized resources went unnoticed until they showed up as a lump sum on the invoice.

Approach

• Defined a mandatory tagging policy (team, service, environment, cost-center) enforced via Terraform at plan time
• Rolled out Azure Cost Management and GCP Billing reports per team
• Set up budget alerts over multiple channels tied to each team’s monthly forecast

Tools

Terraform Infracost Azure Cost Management GCP Billing

Outcome

Detailed cost attribution rose to ~85% of total spend, up from practically 0%, giving each team a clear, owned line item on the bill. With that visibility in place, teams identified and eliminated oversized and orphaned resources, cutting that portion of spend by over 40%.