This is entirely artificial: I now work at a company where we know very clearly what our infrastructure costs. Yes, we know the exact costs (what was negotiated, not what is on the public pages).
And we celebrate costs slashing as much feature delivery and other stuff.
But this is entirely a management problem: at my previous job, only one manager (skip-level manager from my point of view) knew what exactly were we paying for infrastructure.
That moron wouldn't share that information with us engineers managing infrastructure of course, so there were a lot of infrastructure choices that didn't really made sense according to the public prices but (I guess?) made sense according to a price sheet we didn't know.
So we didn't know what we were spending, didn't have the basic data to estimate the price of a new solution or a new service and didn't have the data to determine how much would we be saving by making changes (optimizing stuff etc).
I fought that battle for a bit but then i just said "GFYS, i'm not going to have fights with you so that you can save money" and let go. Later i left the company completely.
Former colleagues tell me it's even worse now: there are consultants from the cloud provider involved, they know the pricing deals, and whenever the topic comes up the manager shushes the consultant so that the engineers don't hear the prices.
tl;dr: it's an entirely artificial problem, and it's most likely a cultural/management problem.
edit: and i'm not even talking about incentives, as somebody else has correctly pointed out.
And we celebrate costs slashing as much feature delivery and other stuff.
But this is entirely a management problem: at my previous job, only one manager (skip-level manager from my point of view) knew what exactly were we paying for infrastructure.
That moron wouldn't share that information with us engineers managing infrastructure of course, so there were a lot of infrastructure choices that didn't really made sense according to the public prices but (I guess?) made sense according to a price sheet we didn't know.
So we didn't know what we were spending, didn't have the basic data to estimate the price of a new solution or a new service and didn't have the data to determine how much would we be saving by making changes (optimizing stuff etc).
I fought that battle for a bit but then i just said "GFYS, i'm not going to have fights with you so that you can save money" and let go. Later i left the company completely.
Former colleagues tell me it's even worse now: there are consultants from the cloud provider involved, they know the pricing deals, and whenever the topic comes up the manager shushes the consultant so that the engineers don't hear the prices.
tl;dr: it's an entirely artificial problem, and it's most likely a cultural/management problem.
edit: and i'm not even talking about incentives, as somebody else has correctly pointed out.