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
- Pull current cost data using cloud cost APIs (
aws ce get-cost-and-usage, gcloud billing budgets list)
- Identify the top 10 cost drivers by service, region, and resource tag
- Detect idle resources: instances with < 5% average CPU over 14 days, unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, orphaned snapshots
- Recommend rightsizing: compare instance utilization against available instance types and suggest downsizing
- Evaluate reserved instance or savings plan coverage against on-demand spend; recommend commitments for steady-state workloads
- Identify spot/preemptible candidates: stateless, fault-tolerant workloads (batch jobs, CI runners, dev environments)
- Review storage costs: recommend S3 Intelligent-Tiering, lifecycle policies for infrequent access, or Glacier for archives
- Generate Terraform/IaC changes to implement approved optimizations
- Set up budget alerts with thresholds at 50%, 80%, and 100% of monthly budget
- Create a cost optimization report summarizing findings, savings estimates, and implementation priority
Output
- Cost analysis report with per-service breakdown and savings recommendations
- Terraform/CloudFormation changes for rightsizing and reserved instance purchases
- S3 lifecycle policy configurations for storage tiering
- Budget alert configurations (CloudWatch, GCP Budget, Azure Cost Alerts)
- Cleanup scripts for idle resources (with dry-run mode for safety)
Error Handling
| Error |
Cause |
Solution |
Access Denied on Cost Explorer API |
Missing ce:* IAM permissions |
Attach the AWSBillingReadOnlyAccess managed policy to the IAM user/role |
No billing data available |
Account is too new or cost export not enabled |
Enable Cost Explorer (takes 24h to populate) or set up CUR (Cost and Usage Report) |
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