I remember a client who called me once, sounding slightly desperate:

“Claude… Our AWS bill keeps increasing. We didn’t change anything, but it just goes up every month.”

I stayed quiet for a second.
Not because I didn’t know what to say —
but because I already knew what I would find.

Most of the time, AWS isn’t “too expensive.”
Azure isn’t “pushing consumption.”

No.
What’s expensive is usually the network beneath the cloud.

And that client, like many others, had no idea that their network design was silently draining money.

🧩 1. The moment I realized how networking impacts cloud costs

When I reviewed their architecture, I found:

• uncontrolled outbound traffic

• overly open subnets

• unnecessary routes generating paid traffic

• leftover resources costing money

• inter-AZ traffic exploding the bill

Nothing dramatic.
But there was a clear lesson:

“The Cloud isn’t expensive. Bad Cloud design is expensive.”

And a principle came back to me:

“Networking is the hidden economy of the Cloud.”

🧠 2. Why does networking have such an impact on Cloud billing?

Here are the 4 most common issues:

📌 1. Outbound traffic (egress)

Cloud providers charge every byte leaving the VPC.

A wide-open VPC is like a house with open windows:
➡️ air leaves
➡️ you pay
➡️ you don’t know why

📌 2. Poor subnet architecture

Too much internal traffic crossing AZs or VPCs =
👉 you get charged.

Good segmentation reduces inter-AZ traffic dramatically.

📌 3. Strange or forgotten routes

A misplaced NAT Gateway can generate thousands of requests.
Each micro-request = micro-cost.

📌 4. Forgotten resources

Old load balancers, snapshots, unused disks…
Cloud ghosts that burn money silently.

🔧 3. What a networking-minded engineer does to fix this

A network engineer with cloud awareness can:

✔️ analyze traffic patterns

✔️ redesign the VPC to reduce waste

✔️ optimize internal routes

✔️ minimize unnecessary inter-AZ traffic

✔️ avoid NAT Gateway billing traps

And often…
➡️ we save 20–40% of the cloud bill
without touching the apps
without removing services
without lowering performance.

It’s simply a matter of structure and clarity.

❤️ 4. The LS2EC message

You don’t need to be a cloud expert overnight.
You don’t need to memorize every AWS or Azure service.

You just need to:

• understand the fundamentals

• see the cloud as an organized network

• learn calmly

• remove the fear of complexity

I tell LS2EC students all the time:

“The Cloud is just networking with a different accent.”

It’s not an elite field.
It’s a structured field.

And if you understand networking…
➡️ the Cloud becomes clear.