UNICORNE | WHITEPAPER
falling behind whilst competitors keep innovating. The role of cost optimisation is not to slow down innovation but to ensure it’ s sustainable.”
Rebuilding trust To rebuild trust, the first step is to restore visibility with alerts and budget segmentation. This means real-time dashboards, alerts at 75 % and 90 % of monthly budget segmented by environment and resource-level tagging enforced through automation.
The second is to establish strong controls, such as quotas and mandatory tagging. Deploy budget quotas per environment, automatic shutdown of non-production environments after hours and approval workflows for large instance types.
The third is to demonstrate results quickly with easy wins.“ Once the team sees savings in action, they regain the confidence to keep moving forward,” Éric says.
Governance as Code Cost governance requires the same‘ as code’ approach that transformed infrastructure management.“ Cost governance as code is becoming essential,” Éric observes.“ It mirrors the philosophy of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. Governance must be built into automated processes.”
That means enforcing tagging rules, blocking oversized instances in development, and shutting down non-production environments after working hours directly within automated
THREE ESSENTIAL MEASURES
If a DevOps team could only implement three cost optimisation measures, Éric offers clear guidance.
“ The first priority is to equip the team with proper visibility,” he says.“ Without the right tools, it’ s simply not possible to understand the impact of infrastructure changes.”
The second is to configure real-time alerts at 75 % and 90 % of the monthly budget, segmented by environment: development, staging and production. Development overspending often indicates inefficient testing practices, staging spikes might signal forgotten load tests and production surprises require immediate investigation.
“ The third is to enforce strict tagging and automatic shutdown of non-production environments after working hours,” Éric says.
Development and staging environments running 24 / 7 waste approximately 70 % of their costs outside business hours.
For a team with $ 20,000 in non-production infrastructure, this single change saves $ 14,000 annually.
118 November 2025