Cost Is an SLI: Why Your System Is “Healthy” but Burning Cash

There’s a class of failure that doesn’t page anyone. No SLO breaches, no latency spikes, no 3 AM Slack messages from an on-call engineer clutching cold coffee. The system is working — by every conventional measure it’s healthy — and yet something is deeply wrong. Money is hemorrhaging out of the infrastructure at a rate that won’t become visible until the CFO opens a billing dashboard, squints at a number that seems obviously misformatted, and then realizes with a specific, cold dread that it isn’t.