EOBs and EC2s: The Cloud Cost Mirage

You Have the Data, But Not the Answers

Why Cloud Visibility Isn’t Binary — It’s a Spectrum

A few weeks ago, I got one of those familiar envelopes from my health insurance company. Big, bold letters on the top read: “This is not a bill.” Inside? An Explanation of Benefits (EOB).

You know the type, columns, codes, dollar amounts, and acronyms simultaneously feeling official and unintelligible.

Why did one visit cost $300 and another $900? What’s a CPT 99214? And why am I paying anything if this was “covered”?

It looked like I had all the information, but I was drowning in data and not understanding. And then it struck me: This is precisely what cloud cost management feels like for many organizations.

We Think We Have Cloud Cost Visibility. But Do We?

In today’s FinOps-driven world, companies proudly say:

• We’ve tagged everything.

• We have dashboards.

• We get anomaly alerts.

·       Our costs are broken down by team and project.

Great, you’ve got an EOB for your cloud. But can you answer these?

• Why did your EC2 usage spike last Thursday?

• Which customer feature caused that storage burst?

• Is this service still supporting revenue, or are you just paying to keep it alive?

For most? The answers are fuzzy at best.

That’s because cloud visibility isn’t binary; it’s a spectrum. And understanding your cloud costs is about moving from just having data to knowing what to do with it.

Turning Visibility Into Strategy: My FinOps Role in a PaaS Project

When we launched our internal PaaS automation platform, the mission was bold: Scale fast, support innovation, and stay cost-efficient.

As expected, once we scaled, cost visibility became a concern. We had the numbers. But we didn’t have the narrative.

Storage costs were rising, unused environments were running, and teams were unsure if our growth was strategic or just expensive.

That’s when I stepped in to lead our FinOps transformation, guided by a simple yet powerful framework I developed, my signature approach: the Three Cs: Context, Correlation, and Clarity.

1. Context: Give Meaning to the Numbers

We started with raw cloud reports filled with figures, which were just numbers.

So, I partnered with product owners and engineers to map workloads to business functions: Dev, Prod, Onboarding Demos, Experimentation Zones, you name it.

That simple mapping made waste obvious. For example, demo environments stayed online for weeks after use. Why? No one had accountability or visibility.

With context, we could instantly tell which costs were strategic and forgotten.

2. Correlation: Connect Costs to Engineering Behavior

Next, I looked at behaviors. What activities were driving those numbers?

We correlated:

• Code commits

• CI/CD pipeline activity

• Background services

• Logging agents

• Environment uptime

This revealed patterns we wouldn’t have seen otherwise:

• A background job ran every 15 minutes, even when it wasn’t needed.

• Duplicate logging agents are deployed across multiple clusters.

• Development environments are idling overnight, with zero user activity.

Suddenly, cost wasn’t a mystery. It was a mirror. Teams saw how their actions (or inactions) were shaping the bill.

3. Clarity: Make It Actionable for Everyone

Having data is one thing. Making it understandable and actionable is another.

So we created:

• Dashboards for engineers to track underused workloads

• Models for finance to correlate spending with customer adoption

• Reports for leadership showing which projects delivered ROI  and which didn’t

The result? Everyone had their version of “truth,” but it was rooted in the same story. We were now speaking a shared language of value.

The Outcome: Better Spending, Better Decisions

With the Three Cs in place, we cut cloud spend by over 30% in one quarter. More importantly, we aligned the same goals with engineering, finance, and leadership.

We didn’t just reduce costs, we optimized value.

Final Thought: From Cloud Visibility to Cloud Intelligence

Cloud data is like an EOB: overwhelming, cryptic, and often useless without interpretation.

But when you add Context, Correlation, and Clarity, you turn that data into something more powerful: cloud intelligence that drives smart, strategic decisions.

Because FinOps isn’t about cutting cloud costs.

It’s about making your cloud investments worth it.

Share Your Experience

Have you ever looked at your cloud dashboard and felt like you were reading an EOB? What’s helped your team move from raw data to real understanding?

Let’s talk FinOps, strategy, and how to make sense of the cloud cost mirage.