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.