When Your CTO Asks About Serverless Costs, What’s Your Plan?

I came across a post on Reddit where the OP asked: “How do you prevent runaway serverless costs?”

I came across a post on Reddit where the OP asked: “How do you prevent runaway serverless costs?”

Now, imagine your CTO asks you to bring solutions to this problem. What would you do?

I want to share a short story that has nothing to do with what OP asked.

At my previous company, during my first six months, I was tasked with solving these challenges:

1- Allow contractor teams to download our logs without granting them full access to our AWS accounts.

2- Build a system that alerts the infra team when their apps stop sending data to our landing zones.

3- Generate a daily health check report to notify the governance team about cost increases on specific services without requiring them to log into AWS.

That experience taught me that even in mature environments, cloud engineers play a crucial role in driving efficiency and governance.

If you’re starting your AWS journey, go beyond tutorials. Find real-world problems to solve, even if they’re small.

Those opportunities will sharpen your skills and prepare you to act when the big challenges come

Cloud engineering isn’t always about building something new, it’s about improving, monitoring, and governing what’s already in place.

I want to hear from you. How would you help OP with such runaway serverless costs?