Ultimately the CTO pays the bill but my boss, the head of Tech Ops, effectively pays the bill for cloud, even though almost all the users are not in his reporting line. Our division is a service to the business as Platform Ops.
Our bill is so big that no one engineer can significantly move the needle, but we have people going around and looking at costs (both Arch and FinOps) to identify what appears to be inefficient spend. We're also quite happy to tell AWS we want something zero rated or discounted if we don't like the cost of it. At a certain size the account team from the cloud provider are somewhat on your side when it comes to negotiations.
Generally architecture reviews and engineering peer reviews should avoid designs which cost a lot, but the most common cause of inefficient engineering practices is when time is more important than money. Then 6 months later someone looks at the cost and says "Why the hell are we doing search that way?", "Because you said you didn't have any time to change the API, so we just made it work this stupid way."
Any new engineer can join and find 5 ways of saving more than their annual salary within a week. But corralling all the teams to actually change the code? That takes leverage.
Our bill is so big that no one engineer can significantly move the needle, but we have people going around and looking at costs (both Arch and FinOps) to identify what appears to be inefficient spend. We're also quite happy to tell AWS we want something zero rated or discounted if we don't like the cost of it. At a certain size the account team from the cloud provider are somewhat on your side when it comes to negotiations.
Generally architecture reviews and engineering peer reviews should avoid designs which cost a lot, but the most common cause of inefficient engineering practices is when time is more important than money. Then 6 months later someone looks at the cost and says "Why the hell are we doing search that way?", "Because you said you didn't have any time to change the API, so we just made it work this stupid way."
Any new engineer can join and find 5 ways of saving more than their annual salary within a week. But corralling all the teams to actually change the code? That takes leverage.