These days, a major part of most IT budgets is the cloud bill. But unlike server-bound infrastructure budgeting, cloud bills can be unpredictable and highly variable from month to month. However, if organizations embrace cloud cost optimization to regulate cloud bills and avoid surprises, they’ll find themselves with considerable found money that can be reinvested into other areas.

The typical AWS bill, otherwise known as the AWS Cost and Usage Report, includes line items that are useful to both finance and DevOps. However, many of the metrics that are within engineers’ and cloud architects’ control aren’t so simple to discover. To make cost a first-class operational metric for DevOps, teams need visibility into the data that’s relevant to engineering activity.

Recent headlines surrounding big-name IPOs, such as that of Slack and Lyft, have highlighted the very real costs of operating in the cloud. Companies like these are on the hook to pay AWS and other public cloud vendors tens or hundreds of millions of dollars every year, just to run their services.

When it comes to cloud strategy, companies rank “cutting costs” as their top priority for 2019, according to a recent Datamation survey. That’s not to say that they plan to cut back on cloud spending in general; in fact, those budgets are very much expected to grow. Rather, companies are looking for ways to reduce unnecessary costs and optimize cloud spend.