Managing Clouds from the Ground Up: Cost Engineering at Spotify

This post introduces the Cost Insights tool, a Backstage plugin designed to provide engineers with visibility into cloud costs and actionable optimization recommendations. It aims to empower engineers to understand their cloud spend in relation to business growth and make informed decisions about cost optimizations versus growth initiatives. Key features include a cost vs. business graph, detailed product panels for GCP, and project alerting. The tool is designed to prevent over-optimization by only nudging teams with costs growing faster than the business.