Financial Awareness
Developers don’t normally need to consider the financial impact of their decisions, however in a cloud deployment the choice of technology or server specification can have a substantial impact on cost.
Before a technology is chosen, look at the cost of supporting and maintaining that technology. Plan for growth, where will that cost be in 1 or 3 years time, consider the impact of new customers and organic growth over that period.
Regularly right-size resources deployed into cloud providers. Review the billing on at least a quarterly basis and look for upward trends. Review the performance of each cloud service and determine if you have over allocated resources which could be trimmed down.
Adopt the mindset of “just enough” to perform the task - with the cloud its easy to scale up, so no need to over provision.
Review cloud provider technology stacks for cost optimisation through alternative technologies. You may have manually implemented a technology which is provided by a native cloud solution, consider adopting those native services rather than “rolling your own”.
Database technologies are often very expensive, particularly Microsoft SQL Server, where possible determine if you can use an alternative which will be as performant and lower cost to operate.