Failing fast is important, and so is the ability to constrain costs in so doing. If the cost of experimentation is high, then failure becomes something that will have an impact on the company. As soon as a project or system has a meaningful impact on the company, checks and balances will be implemented that are designed to slow it down to prevent an expensive decision from being made with little chance of a good return on investment, such as procuring expensive hardware. It's not as if this concept of business agility is new, owing to the cloud; it has been around for decades. However, what cloud computing provides is the cost benefits of being agile, coupled with minimal upfront costs. The full life cycle of a new business idea could be measured in weeks or months and, in the beginning, it is important to only use very limited cloud resources. If that idea becomes popular, then a cloud native architecture will enable that system to scale up as the system is increasingly used. If the idea doesn't achieve its desired results, then it can be easily stopped, with only the minimal resources invested being regarded as sunk costs. This is the power of failing fast while using the cloud to innovate.

Cost drivers don't only stop with using minimal deployable resources for a new system. Most cloud vendors have innovated in the way the resources are billed to the customer. It's common for the largest vendors to have very fine-grained billing mechanisms, sometimes charging by the second or even faster, with aggregated monthly bills. Gone are the days of a vendor requiring the company to buy the resources and then charging a substantial fee for ongoing maintenance. The costs of cloud resources are fully contained for those resources and have the added benefit of being automatically enhanced as the cloud vendor performs their upgrade cycles. These monthly bills have a huge benefit to most organizations of allowing them to be recognized as operational expenses and not having to request approval for long-term capital expense. While this is mostly an accounting issue, it is an important aspect of the agility that a company gains by using the cloud, since new concepts or systems don't have to wait for approval or a capital request cycle to occur.