1. Get visibility first
You cannot optimise what you cannot see. Tag every resource with an owner, environment and project, enable your provider’s cost reports, and set budget alerts. A simple weekly review of the top ten cost items often reveals quick wins.
2. Right-size compute
Many servers and containers are provisioned for peak load that never arrives. Review CPU and memory utilisation over a few weeks and move consistently under-used workloads to smaller instance types. Autoscaling lets capacity follow real demand.
3. Switch off what is not in use
Development and test environments rarely need to run nights and weekends. Scheduling them to stop outside working hours can remove a large share of their cost. Delete unattached disks, old snapshots and idle load balancers regularly.
4. Use commitments for steady workloads
For workloads that run all the time, reserved capacity or savings plans offer significant discounts compared with on-demand pricing. Commit only to the baseline you are confident about; keep variable load on demand or on spot capacity where interruptions are acceptable.
5. Choose the right storage tier
Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes with lifecycle rules, compress logs, and set retention periods so data is not kept forever by default.
6. Design for cost
- Serverless and managed services for spiky or low-volume workloads
- Caching and CDNs to reduce compute and data-transfer costs
- Keeping chatty services in the same region to avoid transfer charges
- Infrastructure as code so environments are consistent and easy to remove
7. Make cost a team habit
FinOps is the practice of making engineers, finance and product owners jointly responsible for cloud spend. Show teams the cost of what they run, review it monthly, and celebrate savings alongside new features.
Our cloud computing services and DevOps consulting teams run cost reviews and automate these practices. Learn the fundamentals yourself in our Cloud & DevOps Essentials program.