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Cloud Economics8 min read

Cloud Cost Governance: Policies That Actually Work

Enforceable policies that prevent cloud cost overruns without slowing engineers down.

By Richard Ewing·

Policies That Work

1. Mandatory tagging — reject untagged resources automatically. 2. Budget alerts — 50%, 80%, 100% threshold notifications. 3. Approval gates for resources above cost thresholds. 4. Auto-shutdown for dev/staging outside business hours. 5. Quarterly cost review per team with leadership.

Key: make policies automated, not manual. Engineers won't fill out forms, but terraform policies enforce themselves.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.