The hidden budget in your cloud bill

There's a budget for strategic projects hidden in your monthly cloud bill.

Your infrastructure engineering team might already be working on finding these cost savings. After all, they do have experience trying to turn things off to see if anyone is still using it.

But they also have to keep production up, help developers, and deliver projects. This doesn't leave much time for trying to cut waste. So you need ways to free up DevOps time.

Investing in projects that involve making developers self-sufficient often helps. These often involve improving processes and writing lightweight automation. Examples include local development environments, accessible application logs, and reproducible builds.

Reducing the amount of unplanned work makes a big difference. Engineers lose valuable time switching contexts, and frequent firefighting saps morale. You control unplanned work by reducing the number of tasks running in parallel, using automated tests, and keeping your systems simple.

You can free up resources by reducing unplanned work and investing in projects that make developers happy.

This will not only give you some of your margin back, but also reduce your attack surface, and increase your team's understanding of how your systems work.