Optimizing Cloud Costs

Overview

Analyze cloud spending across AWS, GCP, and Azure to identify waste, recommend rightsizing, and generate cost-saving configurations. Covers reserved instances, spot/preemptible workloads, storage tiering, idle resource cleanup, and budget alerting using cloud-native cost management APIs.

Prerequisites

• Cloud provider CLI authenticated with billing/cost-explorer read access
• AWS: ce:GetCostAndUsage, ec2:DescribeInstances, cloudwatch:GetMetricData permissions
• GCP: Billing Account Viewer and Compute Viewer roles
• Azure: Cost Management Reader role
• Access to current infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for rightsizing changes
• At least 30 days of billing data for meaningful analysis

Instructions

1. Pull current cost data using cloud cost APIs (aws ce get-cost-and-usage, gcloud billing budgets list)
2. Identify the top 10 cost drivers by service, region, and resource tag
3. Detect idle resources: instances with < 5% average CPU over 14 days, unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, orphaned snapshots