Strategies and practices for reducing cloud spending while maintaining performance and reliability. Like finding ways to reduce your utility bills without sacrificing comfort, cost optimization involves right-sizing resources, using reserved capacity, eliminating waste, and choosing cost-effective architectures. AWS offers Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor, Azure provides Cost Management, GCP has Cost Management tools, and OCI offers Cost Analysis.
A company reduces their monthly AWS bill by 40% by switching to Reserved Instances for predictable workloads, using Spot Instances for batch processing, and identifying idle resources with Cost Explorer.
All major clouds provide cost visibility (reports/analysis), governance (budgets/alerts), and optimization recommendations (advisor/recommender). AWS and Azure also offer broad, integrated recommendation engines (Trusted Advisor/Azure Advisor), while GCP uses Recommender and billing reports, and OCI provides Cost Analysis plus Advisor and Budgets.