Most cloud bills are paid in Dollars and explained in jargon — a bad combination for a South African finance director. When the Rand weakens, last month’s acceptable bill becomes this month’s board question, even though your usage never changed.
The good news: most cloud overspend is boring, predictable and fixable. Here are the five controls we apply first in cost reviews.
1. Put a name next to every Rand
Untagged resources are unaccountable resources. Before any optimisation, enforce a tagging policy — owner, project, environment — and make untagged deployments fail the pipeline. Within a month you will know which teams and systems drive the bill, and cost conversations stop being abstract.
2. Kill the always-on non-production estate
Development and test environments running at 02:00 on a Sunday are pure waste. Scheduled start-stop for non-production workloads routinely trims 20–40% off compute spend, and nobody notices the difference except finance. This is usually the fastest win on the list.
3. Right-size before you reserve
Reserved instances and savings plans are excellent — after you’ve right-sized. Committing for three years to an oversized instance locks the waste in. Review utilisation first (most workloads idle below 20% CPU), resize, run steady for a cycle, then commit to the smaller footprint.
4. Watch the data-transfer line
Egress charges are where cloud bills surprise people. Chatty integrations between regions, backups pulled across the ocean, an analytics tool that streams raw data out — these show up as an innocuous “data transfer” line that quietly grows. Architecture reviews should treat cross-region and internet egress as a design smell.
5. Report it in Rand, monthly, to someone who cares
A cost dashboard nobody looks at optimises nothing. We set clients up with a monthly view in Rand — trend, forecast, top movers, anomalies — reviewed in a standing meeting with a named owner. Spend that is watched behaves differently from spend that isn’t.
Where to start
If your monthly cloud bill would fund a salary, it deserves a proper review. A structured assessment usually pays for itself inside the first quarter — and gives finance a number they can plan around instead of a Dollar surprise.