Cost Is a Distributed Systems Bug
The first time you watch $18,000 evaporate overnight because someone left autoscaling unbounded on a Kubernetes cluster that decided to provision 400 nodes for a traffic spike that never materialized, you stop thinking about cloud bills as accounting theater. Cost becomes what it always was: a failure mode with teeth.
Zoom’s FinOps team saw their AWS spend double from $20K to $40K daily — not gradually, not with warning klaxons, just a jump that would burn through $600K in thirty days if left unaddressed. The mechanics were mundane: a feature rollout triggered cascading retries in a microservice mesh, with each retry spawning EC2 Spot instances that didn’t terminate cleanly. The cost spike manifested before the performance degradation did. Traditional monitoring missed it entirely because nobody had instrumented the bill.
