The cloud cost review checklist.
What a cost review that treats the bill as evidence actually examines. Use it to run your own first pass, or to test whether a proposed review goes deeper than rightsizing.
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Make the bill attributable first.
- Break spend down by workload and team
- A bill nobody owns is a bill nobody defends.
- Measure tagging coverage before trusting any report
- Untagged spend is where the surprises live.
- Pick a unit the business recognizes
- Cost per order, per tenant, per report: absolute totals hide both growth and waste.
Provisioned against used.
- Compare provisioned with used, per workload class
- Averages hide idle capacity; the gap per class is the finding.
- Find permanent peak provisioning
- Capacity sized for the busiest hour runs all month.
- Check that autoscaling scales down
- Many systems scale up convincingly and down never.
- Question environments that never sleep
- Development and staging running around the clock is pure architecture-shaped waste.
Storage and movement, the quiet half of the bill.
- Match storage classes to access patterns
- Hot storage full of cold data is the most common single finding.
- Trace data-transfer paths
- Egress and cross-zone traffic often out-bill the compute that caused them.
- Find replication nobody reads
- Copies multiply cost; check each one still has a consumer.
- Age the retention rules
- Data kept forever by default is a bill that only grows.
Overhead against what workloads need.
- Measure cluster density
- Platform overhead per workload tells you whether the platform serves the apps or the reverse.
- Count the one-of-everything services
- Overlapping databases, queues, and tools add operating load faster than capability.
- Weigh platform components against team size
- A platform that needs a platform team the company does not have is a cost decision already made.
Contracts, discounts, and their timing.
- Compare reservations with the measured steady state
- Commitments sized to hopes become the floor under your bill.
- Map renewal and expiry dates before recommending change
- The cheapest month to move is the month a commitment ends.
- Treat discounts as anaesthetic, not cure
- A discount on waste is still waste; design problems survive pricing negotiations.
The decisions that generate the bill.
- Find the chatty boundaries
- Fine-grained calls across zones or services turn structure into transfer charges.
- Ask where synchronous could be batch
- Always-on capacity for occasionally-needed work is a design choice.
- Check vendor-specific services for isolation
- Each unisolated proprietary service converts future choice into future cost.
What keeps the gains.
- Give every cost line an owner
- Savings without ownership erode within quarters.
- Set budgets that alert before the invoice
- A monthly surprise is a control failure, not a cloud property.
- Re-measure after every change
- Each improvement is verified against the baseline or it is an anecdote.
Want this run against your estate?
Tell us where cost or complexity is building. The review runs this list against your accounts and returns findings ranked by effect and effort.