Part 5/11:
A telling example shared involved a client using AWS SageMaker for model experimentation. While cloud platforms offer speed and scalability, the costs spiral quickly. An experiment that should take days and a few thousand dollars can, in practice, eat up an entire quarter's budget—$12,000 spent in just 36 hours, leaving teams scrambling to decipher API calls and infrastructure usage.
This unpredictability is a nightmare for enterprise finance teams, highlighting the need for transparent and granular cost management. API calls, resource provisioning, GPU usage—everything must be trackable and predictable to avoid surprises.