r/Cloud

At $300k/month Cloud spend, our bill keeps 
growing faster than our traffic.

Cost Explorer shows the numbers but nobody 
actually checks it weekly.

Trusted Advisor gives 40+ recommendations 
with no priority order.

Anomaly detection emails get archived.

What actually works for your team?

Curious about:
- How often someone reviews the bill
- Whether you automate any cleanup
- If you bought a tool, which one and is it used
- War stories from cost incidents

Trying to learn from teams that figured this out.

Hey folks 👋

I'm building an open-source dev tool that turns telemetry data into knowledge graphs that can be used as context in AI coding agents for debugging purposes or improving performance & costs.

Why? My intuition is three fold:

(1) coding agents are much more useful when they understand how a system actually behaves in production, not just what the repo looks like

(2) using raw telemetry data (for example traces) doesn't really work with coding agents at scale

(3) telemetry context graphs might be even cheaper and more efficient to query compared to using raw telemetry data

Before spending too much time on this & going down the rabbit hole, I'm trying to sanity-check my assumptions and assess if this is actually useful for people building/running AI systems in production. Curious to hear from software engineers that have tried something like this: what worked & what didn't, etc.

Happy to hear thoughts directly in the comments and if anyone's interested in helping out with feedback on the actual tool as I build it, please let me know and I can send more details in private - not my intention to spam anyone.

Appreciate it 🙇

Was memorizing service names without understanding what they actually do in real scenarios. Kept failing practice tests and couldn't figure out why.

The shift that changed everything - understanding the why behind each service before touching exam material.

Passed 3 weeks after making that one change.

Feels like every company eventually reaches:

“Why are we running this tiny internal service on a 40-layer orchestration platform?”

I’m seeing more teams move smaller workloads back to:

- ECS/Fargate

- plain Docker on VMs

- managed PaaS

- even systemd services

Not because Kubernetes is bad.

Because not everything needs:

- operators

- ingress drama

- Helm templating nightmares

- CRD ecosystems nobody understands

- 14 dashboards to debug one timeout

K8s is incredible at scale.

But I think a lot of orgs adopted it WAY before they actually needed it.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing internally.

migrating off MPLS to connect on-prem with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure using Tailscale and BGP as part of a broader cloud networking setup.

during cutover, on-prem /24s and VPC/VNet CIDRs were advertised through Tailscale. Azure peering used AS 65530. on-prem routers were also set to 65530. BGP sessions were not restricted with route filters.

after deployment, latency spiked and packet loss increased across hybrid traffic. apps between cloud and on-prem became unreachable.

traces showed traffic looping between AWS, Tailscale, on-prem, and Azure. prefixes were being re-advertised without control due to identical ASNs and missing filtering. on-prem effectively pulled traffic and re-announced it.

recovery involved disabling BGP peers and rolling back to static routes. service restored after rollback. routes are still unstable while rebuilding.

current plan is to assign unique ASNs and apply proper route filtering. also reviewing path selection and asymmetry.

for teams running hybrid cloud with BGP, what controls are you using to prevent loops and bad advertisements during cutover?

If you had to restart a cloud career today, what would you learn first, and what would you ignore?

https://preview.redd.it/ig4efroog82h1.png?width=1864&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f0d2214df304b7cfd6d237f12f9bc056b8e6ef0

Cuts down unnecessary Cost Explorer calls, making the dashboard cheaper and more predictable to operate.

Refactored to:
- Scheduled Lambda (EventBridge) to fetch billing data
- Cache snapshots in DynamoDB
- Serve from cache instead of querying Cost Explorer directly
- Deduplicated SNS alerts

Stack: Terraform · Lambda · DynamoDB · API Gateway · S3 · CloudFront · SNS · EventBridge

GitHub: https://github.com/Atharva013/Carbon-Optimizer

Would appreciate feedback on the architecture and alerting approach.

https://preview.redd.it/5qgmosfch82h1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=209e9da9763e76a3cc0550562ae9f994fc3a57e0

Hey guys. I'm stressing and looking for advice. Right now I'm 18 months from separation. Way less if I palaces chase and do national guard.

I am currently in school with WGU for their cloud program. I have A+ Net+ Sec+ ITIL Certified Practicioner and when finished with degree will have Solutions Architect and Ops Engineer associate.

I did client systems for 7 years which is just help desk with some exposure to Sysadmin work here and there.

I talked with my leadership and have been doing actual Sysadmin work and will be for another year or so.

I have seen advice recommending help desk to sysadmin to cloud and I guess I am doing that but I am worried about getting my foot in the door to do Cloud Engineering once I get out.

Hello everyone! IT/Tech noob here working to dip his toes into the industry. I have been working on a project the past couple months that allow me access to Microsoft Enterprise Applications/Platforms such as Azure, Intune, Entra, etc. Currently done with said project but still have a few more months of access. Are there any beginner projects/excercises/things I can do on Azure or any of the applications or on the VM i have on Azure to help increase my knowledge from a practical perspective? Thank you for your time

​

Hey everyone, I’m graduating this year and I want to build my career in DevOps/Cloud Engineering. Right now I’m learning Python basics and trying to understand what roadmap I should follow next.

I’m confused whether I should:

Learn from YouTube/free resources first

Join an online/offline course later

Focus on Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) directly or first build strong fundamentals

Can anyone suggest:

A good beginner roadmap for DevOps/Cloud

Best YouTube channels/playlists to follow

Platforms/courses that are actually worth it

Skills I should focus on first (Linux, Networking, Docker, Git, AWS, etc.)

I’d really appreciate advice from people already working in DevOps/Cloud. Thanks!

Did a consulting gig last year for a mid-size company moving their first workload to AWS. Their security lead came from a decade of on-prem and brought the entire perimeter playbook with him. Firewalls, network segmentation, all of that. I could see where this was heading.

Third week in, a developer provisioned a public-facing load balancer with a single click. The security lead lost it. "But we block those ports at the network level."

No you don't. Not anymore. Your developers can spin up public infrastructure faster than you can open a ticket. The control model you had in the data center simply doesn't exist here.

I'm posting this because I keep seeing teams burn months and millions trying to recreate their data center in AWS. The perimeter model doesn't translate. The sooner security teams accept that cloud is a different paradigm, not just someone else's server rack, the sooner they stop fighting the platform and start actually securing it. That's the message I wanted to get out there.

I’m looking deeper into cloud security automation frameworks right now and honestly there’s a huge amount of tooling and terminology around this space.

CNAPP, CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, policy-as-code, IaC scanning, SOAR, auto-remediation, agentic remediation, continuous compliance… in practice not all of it seems worth the operational overhead to implement and maintain.

Would especially appreciate examples around:

• OPA/Rego or Sentinel
• Terraform / IaC scanning
• SCPs / Azure Policy / Org Policy
• drift detection
• CIEM / identity sprawl
• auto-remediation
• compliance evidence/audit workflows
• CNAPP consolidation
• Kubernetes security automation

Hello all, I'm in my 3rd year B-Tech, passing out next year. And honestly into Cloud and aspire to be Solution Architect one day (not because of pay but I like that role of helping providing solutions/recommendations, etc). I don't have any technical expertise or any certificates yet.

I'm willing to work hard till my body breaks down everyday but I don't have any roadmaps to become a Sol. Arch. even on web, it's shows "Not an Entry-Level Job" yes I understand that, but there might/must be something I can set my eyes on right which will eventually help me become Solution Architect in a few years right?

I'm planning to study for AWS certs and make projects but if possible can someone who is in the role (like Sol Arch. Or Cloud Engineer) help me know what I should do in Sequence so that I become Sol Arch one day as that being said it will take time and experience but I need to start somewhere isn't it?

Thankyou for reading 📚

(Small Note: I don't know Coding as I only wanted to focus on cloud, but even that I didn't did, ashamed but wants to start somewhere) pls help .

Hi all, I wanted to drop my website in this subreddit as a way to publicize my work and services.

I'm offering consulting services to offer a post-training step that optimizes models for deployment by avoiding expensive inference, feature lookup, executing kernels, etc. when not necessary.

The underlying tech is essentially advanced analytics that cross-correlates high dimensional data with predictions, and finds regions of the data space that don't require compute-heavy resources.

I can help with systems where the objective is to reduce cost, increase throughput, reduce latency, and reduce energy usage.

If you're interested in a pilot or have questions, please do reach out here or book a meeting through the website. I love working on technical problems so I'm very committed to solving yours.

https://compressmodels.github.io

Hey guys since I am new to this field I don't really know the insides about the field but I keep hearing about AI Orchestration and it is the future of cloud and DevOps so I want to get insights of current working professionals who are seeing the changes daily. How much has AI Orchestration has really progressed and what are the roles that's gonna get changed really hard. How is it affecting the job market?

Hello Everyone,

Been doing trade/manual labor style work for years and honestly my body already feels the wear and tear from it. I respect the work, but I know I can’t keep doing physically demanding jobs forever.

Lately I’ve been looking into cloud computing and FinOps because it seems like an interesting mix of tech, business, problem solving, and potentially a better long-term lifestyle physically and financially.

Problem is… I have basically zero tech background.

No coding experience.
No IT experience.
No degree yet.
Most of my experience is aircraft maintenance and military life.

Right now I’m looking at maybe starting on getting Google IT Support cert? then take AWS practioner course, I am looking to apply to WGU (online univ) to get my degree as well.

I can’t carry much over from my military life to this transition, but hopefully my security clearance and work ethic can help me a bit.

Any suggestions, recommendations and tips would help.

hey guys I just wanted to know whether certs actually do make a difference when applying for any associate level jobs cuz as a fresher with only experience in doing an internship should I just do a administrator cert and aim for jobs or just having good projects enough