Cloud Cost Optimisation: A 10-Point Checklist for Engineering Teams

Cloud bills tend to grow quietly until someone notices. These ten checks consistently uncover savings without sacrificing reliability.

1. Tag everything

You can't optimise what you can't attribute. Enforce tags for team, environment and project through infrastructure as code.

2. Right-size compute

Most instances are over-provisioned. Review CPU and memory utilisation over 30 days and size down where headroom is excessive.

3. Turn off what you don't use

Schedule non-production environments to shut down outside working hours. It's often the fastest win available.

4. Commit to steady workloads

Reserved instances and savings plans offer deep discounts for predictable baseline usage.

5. Use spot capacity for flexible jobs

Batch processing, CI runners and stateless workers are good candidates for spot or preemptible instances.

6. Tier your storage

Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes with lifecycle policies, and delete orphaned snapshots and volumes.

7. Watch data transfer

Cross-region and internet egress costs add up. Keep chatty services close together and use a CDN for public assets.

8. Autoscale properly

Scale on meaningful metrics and set sensible minimums so you pay for demand, not peak capacity all day.

9. Review managed service tiers

Databases and caches are frequently provisioned for launch-day fears. Revisit tiers with real usage data.

10. Make cost visible

Share a monthly cost dashboard with engineering teams and set budget alerts. When engineers see cost, they design for it.

Need a second pair of eyes on your cloud bill? Our Cloud & DevOps team runs focused cost reviews.