Cloud costs grow quietly until they become a crisis. These 15 strategies can typically reduce cloud spending by 30–60% without sacrificing performance.
1. Right-Size Your Instances
Overprovisioning is the single biggest source of cloud waste. Most instances run at 10–20% average CPU utilisation. Review usage over 14 days and downsize anything consistently below 20% CPU.
Typical saving: 20–40% of compute spend.
2. Use Reserved Instances / Committed Use
| Provider | 1-Year Saving | 3-Year Saving |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Reserved Instances | Up to 40% | Up to 60% |
| Azure Reserved VM Instances | Up to 40% | Up to 65% |
| GCP Committed Use Discounts | Up to 37% | Up to 57% |
| OCI Universal Credits | Up to 20% | Up to 33% |
3. Use Spot/Preemptible Instances
AWS Spot, Azure Spot, and GCP Preemptible VMs offer up to 90% discount for interruptible workloads: batch processing, ML training, CI/CD pipelines.
4. Turn Off Non-Production Resources
Schedule dev, test, and staging environments to stop outside business hours. Potential saving: 65% on non-production compute.
5. Implement Storage Tiering
Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper tiers. AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs $0.00099/GB/month vs $0.023/GB for Standard — a 96% reduction.
6. Delete Orphaned Resources
Unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, idle load balancers, and unused Elastic IPs all cost money. Regular cleanup can save 5–15% of total spend.
7. Use ARM/Graviton Processors
AWS Graviton3 instances offer up to 40% better price-performance than Intel equivalents. Most modern workloads run without modification.
8. Optimise Data Egress
Use CDN for static content, keep data processing in the same region as storage, and evaluate OCI for data-intensive workloads where egress savings can be enormous.
9. Implement Tagging and Cost Allocation
You cannot optimise what you cannot measure. Implement mandatory tags for environment, team, project, and cost centre from day one.
10. Review Your Support Plan
Many organisations overpay for cloud support. Audit whether your current plan matches actual usage. Developer support ($29/month on AWS) is sufficient for many teams.
11-15: Quick Wins
- 11. GCP Sustained Use Discounts — automatic up to 30% for workloads running most of the month
- 12. Azure Hybrid Benefit — save up to 40% on Windows VMs with existing licences
- 13. Database pausing — stop dev/test databases outside working hours
- 14. Kubernetes node autoscaling — use Spot nodes for stateless workloads
- 15. Monthly cost reviews — make cost optimisation a recurring engineering discipline
Use TCOIQ's Inventory Builder to model your workload costs across all clouds and find your biggest savings opportunities.
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