The typical manual cost optimization sequence looks something like this:

Take a snapshot of your cloud infrastructure costs at a specific point in time

Understand where prices come from by allocating them to teams/departments

Analyze usage and growth patterns to decide which of the costs are here to stay

Explore your infrastructure in detail to check whether any charges can be eliminated (think resources for abandoned shadow IT projects or unused instances left running)

Examine the cases used by your teams and check for overprovisioning

Once you come up with a plan, reach out to engineering and have them approve it

At the same time, try to convince engineers that cloud costs are just as significant as performance

Implement the infrastructure changes to cut your costs

Analyze your future requirements and plan how you’re going to get that extra capacity

Make some reservations or negotiate volume discounts with the cloud provider

Establish governance to make sure that teams use those discounted resources to the fullest

And then I hope you don’t get cloud bill shock at the end of the month!

Allocating, understanding, analyzing, and forecasting cloud costs takes time. Your job isn’t done yet because you must apply infrastructure changes, research pricing plans, spin up new instances, and do many other things to build a cost-efficient infrastructure.  

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