Cost monitoring
CSP platforms are inherently built to be cost transparent. There are no hidden fees or service charges that a customer can't see until they begin building on the platform. All pricing is posted and kept updated on the sites of the big three and is readily available to anyone interested in pricing out an architecture. As mentioned earlier, pricing calculators are available from the CSPs to help prospective customers price out an environment before building. This trend was first established by AWS when they released their initial cloud services and have remained true to this day.
In a similar vein, once systems have been built on the cloud, each CSP has native services to help monitor, drill down, and explore service consumption and their related costs. AWS's Billing & Cost Management Dashboard
is a perfect example of these cloud native capabilities. Features such as AWS Cost Explorer allow users to drill down into monthly bills, look at historical spends, and anticipate...