If you're an engineer, you've likely been there: you receive an email from the VPE. "Our cloud burn rate is up 15% this quarter. Find the leak." Suddenly, you’re spending a week digging through Cost Explorer when you should be shipping features.
This reactive loop is a system failure. The cost of an S3 bucket or an undersized Redis cluster isn't hidden; it's just hidden from the people making the deployment choices (the developers).
The Solution: Move Cost Awareness to the Merge Request.
Step 1: The Cost Budget Function
Most companies already use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) like Terraform or Pulumi. This is our lever. Before deploying, IaC generates a plan detailing what will be provisioned.
The trick is to connect that plan to a cost estimator. Tools like Infracost or Terragrunt hooks can parse the plan output and give you a dollar estimate for new/modified resources.
What we're looking for: A 'cost_impact_monthly' variable that appears for every single PR modifying infrastructure.
Step 2: Implementing the CI/CD Gatekeeper
Simply displaying the cost isn't enough. People ignore warnings. We need an automated gate.
We define two simple rules in our CI pipeline (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI):
Low Impact Threshold (Green Path): If cost_impact_monthly is < $100, auto-approve the infra change, and proceed. This maintains velocity.
High Impact Threshold (Approval Gate): If cost_impact_monthly is > $100 (or $500, define your risk tolerance), fail the pipeline and require a specific /cost-approved comment from an Engineering Manager (or FinOps role) to proceed.
This is the non-obvious shift: The friction is applied only when the financial risk is high. This makes the Engineering Manager the conscious gatekeeper for major spending, while preserving developer flow for minor changes.
The Outcome: From Audit to Prevention
By treating cloud spend as an observable artifact of the deployment pipeline, we turn a quarterly audit problem into a daily prevention system. Developers become cost-aware by default, and your VPE stops sending those embarrassing emails. You’ve successfully made the cheap way the easiest way to ship
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