How to Reduce Your Cloud Infrastructure Costs by 40% This Week

Cloud costs spiral out of control silently. You start small, add services, enable features, and before you know it you're paying 3x what you should. Here are the moves that work.

1. Rightsize your instances

Most teams run instances at 10-20% average CPU. Drop to the next tier and watch the bill shrink immediately. Use AWS Compute Optimizer or GCP's recommender — they'll tell you exactly what to rightsize.

2. Spot / Preemptible instances

For non-critical workloads (batch jobs, CI/CD runners, dev environments), spot instances cost 60-90% less. The interruption rate is much lower than people fear.

3. Reserved instances for stable workloads

If you've been running the same instance type for 3+ months, buy a 1-year RI. You'll save 30-40% immediately with zero architectural change.

4. Eliminate idle resources

Set up a weekly automated scan for unattached EBS volumes, unused elastic IPs, idle load balancers, and forgotten snapshots. These add up to thousands per month.

5. Optimize data transfer

Data egress is where clouds quietly drain your budget. Keep services in the same region and AZ where possible. Use CloudFront or equivalent CDN to serve assets at the edge.

We ran through all five in one sprint. The next bill came in 40% lighter.