Cutting cloud costs by 30% without cutting corners

Cloud bills grow quietly. On a recent engagement, finance and engineering worked together and cut a client's monthly spend by roughly 30% with no impact on reliability.

What moved the needle

1. Rightsizing. About 40% of instances used less than 20% of their CPU.
2. Commitments. Savings plans for the steady baseline, on-demand for spikes.
3. Storage lifecycle rules. Old logs and backups move to cold storage automatically.
4. Non-production schedules. Dev and staging environments shut down at night and on weekends.
5. Tagging and showback. Each team now sees its own costs every week.

The process

• Finance builds the cost baseline and a forecast.
• Engineering validates every change against performance metrics.
• Changes roll out gradually, each with a rollback plan.

Keeping costs low is ongoing work, so we review spend monthly with the client.