Modern cloud platforms make it easy to launch a product and dangerously easy to grow a pile of unmanaged resources.

If you’re a small product team without a dedicated DevOps squad, you still need a basic infrastructure management strategy.

1. Treat your cloud account like production from day one

The quickest way to cloud chaos is to “just spin up a few things for now”.

Instead:

• Separate dev, staging, and production accounts or projects.
• Use clear naming conventions for resources (environment, app, component).
• Lock down who can create or destroy resources in production.

This costs a bit more upfront, but saves days of detective work later.

2. Codify what matters most

You don’t need to migrate everything to Infrastructure as Code immediately, but you do want critical pieces to be reproducible:

• Networking (VPCs, subnets, security groups)
• Databases and their backups
• Load balancers and gateways

Tools like Terraform or Pulumi let you start small: one module at a time, committed to Git, peer-reviewed like normal code.

3. Make backups and disaster recovery boring

Ask two simple questions:

• If our main database vanished, what is the exact recovery plan?
• How long would it take and how much data would we lose?

Then:

• Enable automated backups and test restore procedures on a schedule.
• Write a short DR runbook (one page) with steps, contacts, and decisions.
• Store it somewhere your team can find under pressure.

4. Put guardrails around cost

Cloud invoices have a habit of growing silently.

Set up:

• Budgets and alerts by environment and team.
• Dashboards that show top spenders by service.
• Simple policies: no unused test instances, time-limited experiment resources.

The goal is not to squeeze every cent, but to avoid nasty surprises and obvious waste.

5. Observe before you optimize

Before tweaking instance sizes or rewriting code, make sure you can see:

• Basic health metrics (CPU, memory, latency, error rate).
• Logs from all critical services in one place.
• Alerts that wake humans only when action is truly needed.

With this in place, infrastructure management shifts from firefighting to steady, incremental improvement—exactly where you want your team to be.