What are some major warning signs that signal potential trouble or inefficiency to be on the lookout for when managing cloud spending? What practices should you guard against?

Seeing unanticipated spikes in your bills, with no clear explanations or items outside your budget. For example, if you’re a retailer and you notice a sudden spike but it's not due to Black Friday, there's likely an underlying issue. Start digging into it quickly.

This ties in with a pet peeve of mine: relying on spreadsheets to manage cloud costs. By the time you actually fire up Microsoft Excel and start looking at the cells, your data is old and stale. You want to have something more real-time, and you can address that with cloud monitoring.

Resource allocation alerts are crucial, and they come into play before you receive the bill. This proactive approach allows you to identify and address issues in the first or second week, rather than waiting until the end of the month.

A good metric is savings plan coverage. We look at the coverage of our savings plan against our total bill. We look at how much of our total bill is covered within one of our savings plans compared to what remains uncovered and runs at the regular rate. Our target is typically around 80% to 85% coverage because there are always things coming in and going out. We don't expect to have 100% coverage because then we might be leaving money on the table.

At a basic level, and I think we've all experienced it: a huge bill at the end of the first quarter, and no one knows what it's for. That, to me, is a glaring warning sign.