Every client I’ve talked to in the last three months has the same question: how do we cut our cloud bill? The economy tightened, budgets got scrutiny, and suddenly that AWS invoice everyone ignored is a board-level concern.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: most cloud cost problems aren’t engineering problems. They’re visibility problems. You’re paying for things you don’t know about.
Step One: Know What You’re Paying For
Before optimizing anything, fix your tagging. I know. Nobody wants to hear that. It isn’t glamorous. But if you can’t break down cost by service and environment, you’re guessing.
In a recent engagement, we found that 30% of one organization’s compute spend was on non-production environments running 24/7. Development and staging instances that nobody used after 6pm, burning money overnight and on weekends. The fix – scheduling those environments to shut down outside business hours – took a week to implement and cut the monthly bill meaningfully.
You can’t fix what you can’t see.
The Easy Wins
These require no architectural changes, minimal risk, and work across every cloud provider:
Kill orphaned resources. Unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, old load balancers pointing at nothing, snapshots from services that were decommissioned months ago. Every AWS account I’ve audited has thousands of dollars in monthly orphan costs.
Right-size underutilized compute. Pull two weeks of CPU and memory metrics. If your instances consistently sit at 10-15% utilization, drop a size. This is obvious but most teams never look at the data.
Schedule non-production environments. Dev and staging don’t need to run at 3am. Shut them down evenings and weekends. Automate the start/stop.
Apply storage lifecycle policies. Move cold data to cheaper tiers. Set expiration policies on logs. If you’re keeping CloudWatch logs for a year because nobody configured retention, that’s money on fire.
Commitments: Be Careful
Reserved instances and savings plans can save real money on stable workloads. The trap is overcommitting. I’ve seen teams lock in three-year reservations right before a product pivot made half their infrastructure obsolete.
Commit only to what you’re confident will be steady for the commitment period. In late 2022, flexibility is worth more than a marginal discount.
The Recurring Habit
Cost optimization isn’t a project. It’s a habit. Monthly review of trends and anomalies, clear ownership per service, and guardrails that catch new waste before it accumulates.
Make cost visible to the teams creating it. When engineers see the bill for their services, they make different decisions. Not because they’re being judged, but because they have information they didn’t have before.
The goal isn’t austerity. It’s discipline. Spending money on infrastructure is fine. Spending money on infrastructure you don’t need is waste. And in late 2022, waste is the first thing that gets cut – usually clumsily, by someone who doesn’t understand what the infrastructure does. Better to cut it yourself, surgically, while you still have the context.