[talonx]

I see what you are describing. The pre-production/staging setup may not bring out cost increases caused by application changes, and by the time it is running in production for a while it has already caused a cost explosion.

We did face similar situations - but we fixed them after the cost went up on prod. I guess this has more to do with how much and how fast an "undetected" cost in pre-prod can explode in production. We used to keep an eye on the prod cost numbers after a deployment, and then tackle each one, because the increase was not that quick.

I'm not sure either about a "standard" way, so I'm just thinking aloud here, and I've not tried this myself:

For application changes, measure the difference in cost in pre-prod, in terms of percentage increase, between the previous deployment and the current one, and use that to estimate the possible prod increase. I suspect this will become messy very fast as the other factors to include would be num requests, CPU/memory usage, and so on.