Cut Cloud Costs by 30%: 7 Practical Steps
By Ramzi Al-Samadi·CTOMay 29, 20266 min read
TL;DR
7 practical steps to cut your cloud bill by 30% without affecting performance: reservations, right-sizing, scheduling, and monitoring.
Why Do Cloud Bills Keep Rising?
The three most common causes: unused resources (instances running 24/7 with no workload), old storage that was never deleted, and picking larger instance types than needed.
Each of these can be fixed in a single working day.
The Seven Steps
Start with this priority order:
- Stop what is unused: review instances and databases every two weeks. Stop anything idle for 7+ days.
- Annual reservations: for any stable workload, reserve for 1 or 3 years. Savings: 30-60%.
- Right-sizing: if CPU is < 20% consistently, size down one tier. Often same performance at half the cost.
- Time scheduling: dev/test environments only run during work hours. Stopping them at night saves 65% of their cost.
- Storage cleanup: old backups, logs, temp files. Every GB costs money.
- Cost monitoring: turn on Budget Alerts in AWS/Azure/GCP. Anyone adding a >$100/mo resource needs approval.
- Monthly review: 30 minutes a month in Cost Explorer. The pattern becomes obvious and the actions become routine.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to apply all these steps?
One working day to set up, then 30 minutes monthly to monitor. Savings start from week one.
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