Cloud cost tools show you what happens after it's too late: spend arrives 24–48 hours delayed, ownership is fuzzy, and the answers live in a separate UI engineer rarely open. For Amex GBT, that model had real consequences — costs weren’t following business outcomes and no one could simply explain why

In this session, you’ll learn how Amex GBT operationalized cloud cost end to end with Datadog: starting with allocation as the foundation, putting cost directly in front of the engineers generating it, and building a feedback loop that turned cost management from a quarterly finance exercise into an everyday engineering practice. You'll leave with a practical playbook — from tagging infrastructure to KPI-linked dashboards and anomaly alerting — and a real picture of what's possible when engineers own their spend.