Cloud Cost Optimisation: 5 Strategies That Actually Work

Cloud costs have a habit of growing faster than your user base. These five strategies consistently deliver 20-40% cost reductions for our clients without impacting performance.

1. Right-size Your Compute

Over-provisioned instances are the most common source of cloud waste. Use CloudWatch (AWS) or Azure Monitor to identify instances running at below 20% CPU utilisation for extended periods. Downsizing these is the fastest win.

2. Use Spot/Preemptible Instances for Batch Workloads

Machine learning training jobs, data processing pipelines, and batch analytics are ideal candidates for Spot instances — up to 90% cheaper than on-demand. Use AWS Spot Fleet or Azure Spot VMs with a checkpointing strategy to handle interruptions.

3. Implement Auto-scaling Aggressively

Many teams set minimum instance counts far too high "just in case." Analyse your traffic patterns and implement predictive auto-scaling that scales down overnight and on weekends. We routinely see 30% savings from this alone.

4. Audit Your Storage

S3 and Blob Storage costs compound quickly. Implement lifecycle policies to move data to cheaper tiers (Infrequent Access, Glacier) based on access patterns. Delete or archive stale snapshots and old log files.

5. Reserved Instances for Baseline Load

For stable, predictable workloads, 1-year or 3-year reserved instances offer 40-60% savings over on-demand pricing. Combine with Savings Plans for flexibility across instance types.

The key is building a FinOps culture — treating cloud costs as a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought.