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.