cost optimization
798 articles on cost optimization — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Terraform cost policy as code: enforce budgets, not reminders
Encode cost rules, budget thresholds, per-PR deltas, required tags, banned SKUs, as machine-enforced policies in CI against a cost estimate. Here's the policy set worth having and how to roll it out.
Data transfer cost across clouds: the line item that varies most
Compute and storage have converged, but data transfer hasn't. Here's the shared structure (ingress free, egress tiered, cross-region charged), where AWS/Azure/GCP diverge, and the universal levers to cut it.
Compute Savings Plans vs EC2 Instance Savings Plans: flexibility vs depth
Compute Savings Plans give ~66% off across families and Fargate/Lambda; EC2 Instance Savings Plans give ~72% locked to one family/region. Here's which to pick and how they differ from Reserved Instances.
Azure egress bandwidth cost: first 100 GB free, then it adds up
Azure egress is free for the first 100 GB/month, then tiered ~$0.087/GB; ingress is free. Here's the egress map, the patterns that drive the bill, and how a CDN and region co-location cut it.
GCP Bigtable cost optimization: the per-node floor that decides it
Bigtable bills nodes (~$474/month each, minimum one) + storage. The node floor makes it expensive below scale. Here's how to tune nodes, SSD vs HDD, and when a cheaper datastore wins.
CloudWatch custom metrics cost: cardinality is the whole bill
Custom metrics are $0.30/metric/month, but each metric-name + dimension-value combination is a separate billable metric, so high cardinality explodes the bill. Here's how to control it.
How to reduce your cloud bill: the checklist that works, in order
Delete waste, right-size, commit the baseline, use Spot, tier storage, cut egress, then keep it down with a cost gate. A practical, impact-ordered checklist with links to the details for each step.
FinOps for startups: the lightweight version that actually fits
Startups need budget alerts, basic tagging, and cost in the PR, not a FinOps team. Here's the starter kit, when to buy commitments, the common traps, and why not to over-engineer it.
Cloud cost anomaly detection: a safety net, not prevention
Native anomaly detection (AWS/Azure/GCP, free) alerts on spend spikes, but reactively, after the money's spent. Here's its limitation and why estimating cost in PRs prevents the IaC-driven spikes.
AWS Global Accelerator cost: the per-GB premium, and when it's not a CDN
Global Accelerator is $18/month per accelerator plus a per-GB data-transfer premium. Here's what it's for (anycast IPs, failover, latency), why it's not CloudFront, and how to keep the premium intentional.
Amazon FSx cost comparison: Lustre vs Windows vs ONTAP vs OpenZFS
FSx has four file system types, each billing storage plus throughput. Here's what Lustre, Windows File Server, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS cost, which to use, and how to avoid over-provisioning throughput.
Azure Application Gateway vs Load Balancer cost: L7 vs L4
Load Balancer (L4) is ~$25-40/month; Application Gateway (L7) starts ~$180/month plus capacity units. Here's what the gap buys, when you need L7, and how to avoid defaulting to the pricier option.
GCP load balancer cost: forwarding rules and data processing
GCP load balancers bill forwarding rules (~$18/month each for the first five) plus data processed. Here's why sprawl drives the bill and how URL maps and a CDN cut it.
DynamoDB cost optimization: capacity mode, GSIs, TTL, and table class
DynamoDB cost is throughput + storage + GSIs + extras. Here's how to cut it: match capacity mode to traffic, prune unused indexes, set TTL, and use Standard-IA for cold tables.
AWS vs Azure vs GCP cost: why no cloud is universally cheapest
Comparable compute and storage sit in a narrow band across the three clouds. The real differences are egress, the discounts you'll commit to, and managed services. Here's how to compare apples-to-apples.
Kubernetes cost allocation: turning a node bill into per-team cost
The cloud bills nodes; teams consume pods. Here's how to allocate cluster cost by requests or usage, handle shared and idle costs, and where OpenCost/Kubecost and pre-deploy estimation each fit.
Azure Log Analytics cost optimization: ingest less, not just retain less
Log Analytics bills ~$2.30/GB ingested, the bill is driven by volume, not retention. Here's how to cut it with source filtering, Basic Logs, commitment tiers, and Container Insights tuning.
EFS vs EBS vs S3 cost: pick by access pattern, not the per-GB rate
S3 (~$0.023/GB) is cheapest, EBS (~$0.08) middle, EFS (~$0.30) priciest, but they're not interchangeable. Here's how to match the service to the access pattern and avoid paying 13x by using EFS where S3 would do.
Azure Spot VMs: when 90% off is worth the eviction risk
Azure Spot VMs run up to ~90% below pay-as-you-go, evictable with 30 seconds' notice. Here's the eviction model, what workloads fit, AKS Spot pools, and how to design for interruption.
GKE Autopilot cost optimization: you pay for requests, not usage
Autopilot bills pod resource requests (~$0.0445/vCPU-hour), not nodes, so oversized requests are the overspend. Here's how to right-size requests, use Spot Pods, and pick compute classes.
Azure VNet peering cost: the per-GB charge that bills both ways
VNet peering has no hourly fee but charges ~$0.01/GB each direction (more for global). It bills on both sides. Here's where the cost hides in hub-and-spoke and chatty services, and how to cut it.
CloudTrail cost optimization: data events are the explosion
Management events' first copy is free; data events ($0.10/100k) on busy S3/Lambda can hit thousands per month. Here's the cost layers and how to scope data events so CloudTrail stays cheap.
AWS EKS full cost breakdown: the control plane is the small line
EKS cost is control plane ($73/mo) + worker nodes (the bulk) + EBS + load balancers + NAT + cross-AZ transfer. Here's the full breakdown and where the real savings are, almost all in the nodes.
Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server cost: tiers, HA, and reservations
Flexible Server bills compute by tier (Burstable ~$12/mo, General Purpose, Memory Optimized) + storage. HA doubles compute. Here's how to pick the tier, when to skip HA, and how reservations and stop/start cut the bill.