The Great Cloud Cleanup: Slashing Costs by Tackling Unused Resources
Discover how proactive cloud management and optimization can reveal hidden savings and enhance operational efficiency, transforming your cloud strategy for better cost control.
A few years ago, I wrote an article on LinkedIn titled "The Importance of Cost Scalability and What to Watch Out For," based on my experiences navigating the world of cloud costs. This article touched on the concept of wasted resources, and I wanted to take the time to expand on this topic.
As mentioned in my original article, cloud costs have become a significant concern for businesses as they increasingly rely on cloud services for their technical operations. While cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer scalability and flexibility, they also present significant challenges in cost management. One of the most pressing issues is the potential for wasted or unused resources. According to the Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report, up to 35% of cloud spending is wasted on resources that are either idle or underutilized. This wastage often occurs due to the complexity of managing cloud environments, where multiple services and resources are provisioned dynamically, leading to situations where some resources remain idle or are over-provisioned beyond actual needs.
Finding and addressing waste in cloud environments can be particularly challenging because these costs typically accumulate gradually rather than manifesting as sudden spikes. Idle or underused resources do not immediately trigger alarms, and their incremental costs can blend into the overall spending, making them less noticeable. Examples of this type of waste include:
Idle instances / VMs
Unattached storage volumes
Underutilized load balancers
Unused public IPs
Unused NAT gateways
While there are plenty more to list, these are just a few that come to mind. As a result, businesses may not realize the extent of their inefficiencies until significant sums have been wasted. The lack of visibility and control over dynamically changing cloud environments exacerbates this issue. Effective cost management requires continuous monitoring, detailed usage analysis, and proactive optimization strategies.
So, what is someone to do? Do you write a Lambda function to help monitor? Do you search for open-source solutions, deploy, maintain, and wait for alerts to come in? Once you get notified, how do you clean up and fix? These are the questions people were asking and that I personally experienced, which led us to focus on the cost optimization problem. We believe solutions like CloudXray play a crucial role in this process by providing automated recommendations with associated actions that integrate with your processes.
If you would like to have a conversation regarding costs or need help learning where the opportunities in your organization may lie, I would be more than happy to help. Feel free to reach out to me by email, clicking the “Book a Demo” button on our website, or contacting me on LinkedIn. Let’s see if we can solve this together.
