Cloud cost issues are rarely caused by one big mistake.
They usually grow silently one resource at a time.
Recently, I had to deal with an unexpected cloud cost spike. What initially looked like a billing problem quickly turned into a full migration, audit, and cleanup of our cloud environment. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was intense and very real.
The migration wasn’t simple
For every service, the process was repetitive and mentally exhausting:
- Redeploy the service
- Verify it was working correctly
- Check whether it was collaborating properly with other services
- Update GitHub Actions secrets
- Fix CI/CD pipeline issues
- Handle lint failures blocking builds
Then repeat the same steps for the next service.
Habaa… it took a lot of effort and patience.
This wasn’t just about “fixing costs”. It required deeply understanding why each resource existed and whether it was still needed.
What I had to do along the way
As part of this process, I ended up:
- Auditing all existing cloud resources and identifying stale or unused ones
- Cleaning up resources that were created earlier but no longer served a purpose
- Fixing inconsistent naming that made it hard to distinguish environments
- Reorganizing environments so production resources could be governed more effectively
- Making architecture decisions to reduce always-on costs
- Standardizing deployments through CI/CD instead of manual scripts
None of this was about blaming anyone. These situations are common, especially in startups.
Why this happens in startups
Startups move fast. The focus is always on building the application:
- shipping features
- experimenting with services
- validating ideas quickly
Infrastructure often becomes secondary not because people don’t care, but because speed feels more urgent. Over time, unused resources, inconsistent practices, and missing governance start to pile up.
This is normal.
But prevention and maintenance that responsibility is still ours.
The real lesson I learned
Cloud is often chosen to avoid the heavy upfront cost of on-prem infrastructure. But cloud replaces capital cost with operational responsibility.
Without:
- regular audits
- proper naming and tagging
- access control
- logging
- disciplined CI/CD practices
cloud doesn’t suddenly become expensive it slowly becomes unmanageable.
This experience taught me that treating cloud operations as a “background task” is risky. Running the cloud needs the same level of seriousness as building the application itself.
Ending the year with clarity
This wasn’t the easiest problem I worked on this year. It was tiring, sometimes frustrating, and required constant context switching.
But it was also valuable.
Not everything that happens in engineering is a mistake.
Some incidents are lessons if we take the time to learn from them and improve our systems.
Ending the year with this realization feels meaningful.
Next time, the foundation will be stronger.
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