You can reduce cloud costs by using the cloud cost optimization best practices like:
– give your teams the responsibility to manage their cloud spend
– use a centralized team to manage; policies, knowledge sharing, tooling, and vendors
– scale resources to only what you need
– make use of automation like infrastructure as code and auto-scaling
– use reservice instances where possible
Reducing cloud costs is not an absolute goal. You want to reduce costs in relation to business outcomes. If a certain cloud spend brings a lot of business value you don’t want to reduce cloud costs over there. Managing cloud spend and reducing cloud waste should be top of mind for your FinOps-teams. Common causes of cloud waste are; oversized resources and data-storage, unused assets, lack of automation, and not taking advantage of discounts like with reserved instances.
You always want to optimize your cloud costs so you maximize the business benefits of your cloud computing in relation to your cloud spend. Read also Why is cloud cost optimization important.
There is more then just managing your costs. By optimization of your cloud you optimize all aspects of your cloud computing to maximize business benefits. Aspects of Cloud optimization are; performance of applications, speed of innovation, time-to-market, continuity, compliance and costs.