The cloud cost crisis.
Cloud spending grew 29% year-over-year, with the average enterprise wasting 32% of their cloud budget on idle or over-provisioned resources. Without deliberate optimisation, cloud costs compound rapidly and often exceed the savings from migrating off on-premise infrastructure.
Right-sizing and reserved capacity.
Start with right-sizing: analyse actual CPU, memory, and network utilisation over 30 days. Most instances run under 40% utilisation. Combine right-sizing with Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for predictable workloads to achieve 30–60% cost reductions.
Spot instances and serverless.
For fault-tolerant workloads (batch processing, CI/CD, data pipelines), spot instances offer 60–90% discounts. For event-driven workloads, serverless functions eliminate idle costs entirely. The key is matching the pricing model to the workload pattern.
FinOps as a practice.
Sustainable cost optimisation requires cultural change, not just technical fixes. Implement tagging standards, create team-level cost dashboards, set budget alerts, and conduct monthly cost reviews. FinOps makes cloud cost a shared responsibility across engineering and finance.