Ultra Tech had grown into forty-one AWS accounts with no shared tagging, three separate logging setups, and an invoice that arrived as a surprise. Incidents were diagnosed by SSH, and cost reviews were arguments about who owned what.

We rebuilt the foundation on Terraform so every account inherits the same logging, metrics and tag policy from the start. Grafana became the single pane - infrastructure, application and cost on the same screen - and every spend line resolves to a named team.

Right-sizing and orphaned-resource cleanup came first, then commitment planning against real utilisation. Detection time fell from 47 minutes to under 6, and the monthly cost review became a five-minute read instead of a workshop.

We wrote the tagging and ownership policy with finance and engineering in the same room, then made the infrastructure code enforce it. Tooling without that agreement is how the previous three attempts stalled.