Why doesn't anyone notice my cloud work until it spikes?

You open the console. The spend line is flat, maybe falling. You did that. No one is in the room to see it, and no one will be, because flat lines don't generate Slack messages. Then one month something slips — a forgotten instance, a team that spun up without asking — and suddenly there are six people in a thread with opinions about cost management, none of whom opened a dashboard in the last year. This is not a flaw in your job. It is the shape of it. Prevented cost produces no event. You are angry that silence is the reward for competence and noise is the reward for failure — but that arithmetic will not change because you resent it. Only your behavior can change. The mistake is waiting for the invisible work to announce itself. It will not. You must be the one who writes it down, puts a number on it, and puts that number somewhere people see it before the spike forces them to look.