Waterfall · Diagram Design

Cloud budget bridge · FY25 → FY26

How a 240 $k/mo baseline becomes a 236 $k/mo plan. Two costs rise, two fall — and the running total carries across every gap, so the walk has to reconcile.

Cloud budget bridge · FY25 → FY26 Waterfall chart bridging the FY25 cloud budget of 240 thousand dollars a month to the FY26 plan of 236, through headcount growth, reserved-instance savings, new ML workloads, and storage tiering — the largest saving. CLOUD SPEND · $K / MO 100 200 300 400 240 +64 −38 +22 −52 236 FY25 base Headcount Reserved inst. ML workloads Storage tiering FY26 plan LEGEND Start / end total Cost added Cost removed Storage tiering · largest saving

LARGEST SAVING

Storage tiering · −52

Moving cold datasets to archive tiers claws back more than storage grew all year. It lands late in the walk on purpose — the carry shows the budget was above baseline until this one step.

The walk reconciles

240 + 64 − 38 + 22 − 52 = 236. Every bridge spans exactly its two running levels, and each carry line transports the total across the gap at that level — the chart is checkable arithmetic, not decoration.

What the bridge doesn't show

Each bar is a net figure. Headcount's +64 contains both new hires and one team's downsizing; the walk states contributions, not the churn inside them.

cloud budget bridge · fy25 → fy26 example · diagram design