Cloud expenses can spiral fast but with smart strategies, you can rein them in. This article breaks down nine simple yet clever ways to slash your cloud costs, from setting budgets with built-in consoles to using spot instances and offloading cold data. Whether you’re running a startup or an enterprise, these tips will help you cut waste and get the most bang for your buck.
Track budgets with cost management consoles
Start by using the built-in cost management tools offered by cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. These consoles let you set spending limits, track usage, and get alerts so you don’t blow your budget.
You can then use detailed reporting and analytics to break down where your money is going. Tag resources by department, project, or workload, and review spending regularly. The better your visibility, the faster you can spot unnecessary expenses.
Identify unutilized and idle resources
Companies often waste money on unused or idle cloud resources, like virtual machines, storage, or services. Temporary servers may be left running, or storage linked to terminated instances can go unnoticed, continuing to rack up costs. Similarly, idle resources, such as servers running at only 10% CPU utilization, waste both computing power and money.
To avoid these inefficiencies, conduct regular audits to identify and remove unused resources. For idle ones, consolidate workloads to improve utilization and lower costs. Automated tools can flag underused assets, making it easier to cut expenses without losing flexibility.
Right-size the services
Bigger isn’t always better — or cheaper — when it comes to cloud resources. Right-sizing allows you to analyze and adjust your compute, storage, and database services to the most efficient size. Overprovisioning leads to unnecessary costs, so it’s crucial to match your resources to actual demand.
Since manually sizing instances can be complex with countless combinations of memory, graphics, storage, and throughput options, right-sizing tools can help. These tools provide recommendations across instance families, reducing costs, optimizing usage, and ensuring you get peak performance from your existing resources.
Use spot instances
Spot instances, also known as preemptible VMs, are unused cloud resources offered by providers at a discount. They’re a cost-effective option, often 70–90% cheaper than on-demand instances. Ideal for noncritical workloads, batch jobs, or testing environments, spot instances can offer substantial cost savings. However, because these resources can be reclaimed by the provider at any time, it’s vital that your workloads are able to handle interruptions and automatically scale in case of termination.
Choose more affordable providers
Not all clouds are priced equally. Depending on your needs, switching from a premium provider to a lower-cost competitor — or even using a mix of providers — can unlock big savings. Do some price comparisons and negotiate with vendors; you might be surprised how much you can save.
Move workloads elsewhere
Some workloads may run better on private clouds, colocation centers, or even on-premises hardware. Hybrid cloud strategies let you place workloads where they make the most financial sense, optimizing costs across the board.
Go serverless
Serverless computing takes the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model to the next level, billing down to each transaction or millisecond of use. This makes it ideal for unpredictable traffic or event-driven applications, allowing businesses to significantly cut costs. For example, side projects or proofs of concept can run for just pennies a month until demand scales up, making serverless perfect for businesses that want to minimize costs while remaining ready for growth.
Offload cold data
Why pay top dollar to store data you rarely access? Move infrequently used “cold” data to cheaper storage tiers or archival services. Many cloud providers offer options such as AWS Glacier or Azure Blob Storage Cool Tier specifically for this purpose.
Managing cloud costs often involves highly technical solutions and constant monitoring, but we can help simplify the process. Contact our cloud experts today to see how we can optimize your cloud infrastructure and reduce costs while keeping your business agile and scalable.