Cloud cost-cutting that doesn't break things

The fastest way to cut cloud spend is to stop wasting it. Here's our checklist for a 30% reduction without touching architecture.

Most cloud bills have 20–40% of waste hiding in plain sight. We start here:

1. Right-size before reserving. Reserved Instances on oversized workloads are still oversized workloads.
2. Kill zombies. Idle load balancers, unattached disks, old snapshots. They add up.
3. Spot what you can. Stateless workers, batch jobs, dev environments.
4. Tier your storage. S3 Intelligent-Tiering, lifecycle policies. Free money.
5. Tag everything. You can't cut what you can't see.

This list alone has saved clients an average of 31% in the first 60 days.