What’s one crucial lesson or piece of advice that has had the most profound impact on your cloud budget management strategy?

Assign someone the responsibility of creating reports and dashboards and then share these with all the teams. This helps everyone see the actual costs and what's happening in the real world.

Proactive planning and communication. We need to anticipate future cloud needs and communicate resource requirements effectively to stakeholders and cloud providers. This approach is essential to prevent budget overruns, ensure contract compliance, and help everyone understand the consequences of keeping workloads running continuously. You don't keep your gas or your electric stove on just because you want to cook someday later, right? You're going to switch it off. Similarly, you need to relate these practices to make people realize how they impact the organization.

Dedicate someone to review your finances each month. At the very least, someone dedicated to looking at it. So you're not surprised at the end of the year or quarter.

Don't over-engineer the process. Just be very simple in nature and work your way up. Kind of build the airplane as you fly. Don't think about constructing it 100% because it's going to be more expensive that way.

My one piece of advice is: Time is your enemy. You have to be able to make immediate decisions once you identify things that need to be fixed because you're getting billed every second. If you don't fix it, you're paying for it.