cost-optimization
Cost Optimization
Cloud bills rarely have one villain — they have a long tail of small waste and a short list of big levers. Teams that start by auditing every line item burn weeks on savings measured in dollars, while the resource that's 40% of the bill sits untouched because nobody sorted by size first. Optimization is a prioritization problem before it's an engineering problem.
The other trap is treating cost cutting as a one-time project. Spend drifts every time someone ships a new service, forgets to delete a test environment, or a traffic pattern shifts enough to make last quarter's instance sizes wrong. A cost review that runs once and declares victory is already stale by the next billing cycle.
Find the biggest lever with data, pull it, then come back for the next one.
For a ranked catalog of savings levers and how to find candidates, read
references/savings-levers.md.