Cloud bills grow quietly. Nobody decides to waste money, but every forgotten test environment and oversized database adds up.
The five usual suspects
- Oversized compute that never passes 20% CPU
- Idle non-production environments running 24/7
- Unattached storage volumes and old snapshots
- Data transfer between regions and zones
- On-demand pricing for steady workloads
Make cost visible
Tag every resource by team and environment, and send a weekly cost report to the people who can change it. Visibility alone changes behaviour.
Then automate: schedule non-production shutdowns, set budgets with alerts, and review reserved capacity every quarter.
