The platform watches its own cloud spend

What changed for people using Bellwether

• The platform watches its own cloud spend. A daily check reads what building and testing cost in the last day, how many builds started, whether anything is idling at a cost and how many old images are kept, and records a verdict against fixed thresholds. It fails loudly when it cannot read or record one.
• A runaway is caught within the hour. A separate hourly alarm tells the owner when builds start far faster than normal, which is how an earlier runaway went unnoticed for days.
• Cheaper by default, same safety. Heavy test runs moved to a smaller machine, record-keeping changes no longer start a build, the overnight run happens twice a week, old images are pruned, and the console and Consult stop when idle. None of this touches how orders are checked or placed.
• Hand-made fixes are now permanent. Settings first changed by hand during the cost incident, and two monitoring fixes from the day before, are written into the infrastructure definitions, so a later update keeps them instead of quietly putting the old values back.

What you may notice

• The first request to the console or to Consult after a quiet spell can take a few seconds longer: both now start on demand.
• The readiness page's cloud-spend row reads red until the daily check has run once after this release; that is expected and clears on its first run.

Known gaps and what’s next

• The change to what the desk reads before it trades (one blend number everywhere, one 52-week high, a finished day's reading that stays put) waits one release while it is reconciled with an overlapping change.
• The daily spend check, the image clean-up and the hourly alarm are switched on by the owner right after this lands, in a fixed order with stop conditions.
• A monthly read of the bill by line item and a quarterly infrastructure audit are scheduled work, not automation.