This guide was written by Arthur Azrieli , CTO at MeteorOps, and first published on the MeteorOps blog .

The way to reduce cloud costs without slowing engineering is to take the decisions off engineers' plates. Make waste disappear through defaults and automation (lifecycle rules, log retention, after-hours schedules, environment TTLs), buy discounts on the stable baseline you already run, and show each team its own spend where it already works: in pull requests and in a weekly per-team report. Do not add approval gates, ticket queues, or a monthly "cost review" meeting that pulls engineers out of delivery.

In practice that means a specific order. First, get spend attributed to teams and kill obvious waste (idle resources, forgotten non-production environments, unbounded log retention). Second, rightsize and fix the platform defaults that create the waste (Kubernetes requests, node autoscaling, storage classes, NAT gateway traffic). Third, commit to Savings Plans once the baseline is clean.…