Cloud bills have a way of creeping up on you. One day, teams are scaling like a champ, and the next, you’re staring at an invoice with a cost spike bigger than your mortgage. Such is the life of FinOps practitioners.
If your organization is serious about cutting waste, cloud cost optimization, and getting CFO-friendly results without tanking performance, here are four must-have strategies.
Containers are awesome—until they’re not.
Containers simplify deployment while complicating cloud cost optimization. The cloud is all about speed to market, but we should always assess what we have because containers can be a silent budget killer.
Here’s a few tips to right-size clusters:
- Identify containers that are running at 10% utilization. You’re paying for 100% of cluster capacity.
- Use autoscaling smartly. Scale down as aggressively as you scale up.
- If you are multi-cloud – Evaluate cost options in different clouds during your next architecture review. There can be big savings in certain environments.
Pro tip: If you’re running Kubernetes, make sure your cluster autoscaler actually aligns with your usage patterns. Otherwise, you’re just burning cash.
Commitments: Your best friend (or worst enemy)
Buying Reserved Instances (RIs) or Savings Plans is like signing up for a gym membership—great savings if you actually use them. But if your workloads shift and you’re locked into the wrong instances? Ouch.
- Go for shorter-term commitments unless you’re 100% sure of long-term usage.
- Leverage the best savings plan or use a mix of RIs + spot instances + on-demand for flexibility.
- Monitor utilization. If you’re not getting at least 80% efficiency, rethink your commitments strategy.
Pro tip: If you already have unused RIs, check if you can resell them on a marketplace instead of eating the loss.
Pay-as-you-go pricing is your friend if you play the game right
The cloud’s biggest feature (pay-as-you-go pricing) is also its biggest trap. If you’re paying full price for everything, you’re doing it wrong.
- Spot instances for non-critical workloads = huge savings (think 70-90% off).
- Turn stuff off when you’re not using it. Automate shutdowns for dev/test environments.
- Leverage auto-scaling for workloads with variable demand. Why pay for max capacity 24/7?
Pro tip: Consider using compute savings plans instead of RIs if you want greater discount flexibility across different instance types.
IaaS/Compute optimization: The ‘obvious’ fix that nobody does
Most cloud bills have at least 30% waste built in. Why? Because teams provision first and optimize never. Time to change that:
- Kill zombie resources. Every cloud account has abandoned VMs, unused storage, and forgotten instances. Find them. Destroy them.
- Right-size everything. Overprovisioned resources = easy cost savings.
- Use AI-powered cost analysis tools. Manually tracking waste is a losing battle. Let the tools do the work.
Pro tip: Start every quarter with a cloud cost review session. It’s a 1-hour meeting that can save you six figures.
Final thoughts: Be ruthless about cloud waste and optimize your cloud costs now
Some of the best FinOps teams we talk to treat cloud costs like engineers treat performance—as something to optimize continuously. A message you can share with your leadership is that the companies that win in cloud aren’t just scaling fast, they’re scaling smart.
All of that said, we know that FinOps is about progressive wins. Starting with a few big wins will buy a lot of leeway to get permission to optimize further. Like everything in business it’s a cross-functional relationship game. Let’s help teams save money so they will partner with us, allowing us to save them even more.
