Cloud waste usually comes from oversized instances, idle resources, and poor environment governance. A good optimization playbook balances savings, performance, and reliability together.
Start with Visibility
- Tag resources by team, environment, and project.
- Create weekly spend dashboards with service-level breakdown.
- Track unit economics such as cost per active user or transaction.
Apply Quick Wins
- Shut down non-production resources after office hours.
- Rightsize compute based on real CPU and memory utilization.
- Move stable workloads to reserved commitments.
Savings targets should be tied to service SLOs so reliability is never compromised for cost reduction.