Cloud
Cutting cloud costs at a startup: a 30 minute review
Cloud bills rarely jump overnight. They creep up as test servers stay on, snapshots pile up and nobody owns the total. This review takes half an hour, needs no special tools and often finds savings on the first pass.
By Wendel Fernandes de LanaFounder, MagzPublished 4 min readIn short
- Start with the bill, not the architecture: a handful of services usually account for most of the spend.
- The quickest wins are idle and forgotten resources, oversized servers, test environments running around the clock and logs kept forever.
- Finish by setting a budget with alerts and naming an owner, so the savings last.
On this page
Before you start
- Read only access to your provider's billing console.
- A list of your environments, even a rough one: production, staging, test and anything experimental.
- Someone who knows what each system does, so nothing important is switched off by mistake.
Make no changes during the review itself. Write down what you find, then act on it after checking with the owner of each resource.
Minutes 0 to 5: read the bill
Open the cost report for the last three months and group it by service. Your provider's own tools are enough:
- AWS: Cost Explorer, with AWS Budgets for alerts.
- Microsoft Azure: Cost Management, with budgets and cost alerts.
- Google Cloud: Cloud Billing reports, with budgets and alerts.
Write down the three services that cost the most and whether each is growing, flat or falling. Growth without a matching rise in customers or usage is your first lead.
Minutes 5 to 15: find idle and forgotten resources
These cost money every hour and do nothing useful:
- Disks and volumes that are not attached to any server.
- Old snapshots and backups beyond your retention policy.
- Load balancers, databases and servers with no traffic.
- Public IP addresses that are reserved but not in use.
- Test and staging environments running through nights and weekends.
- Resources in regions, accounts or projects nobody recognises.
Mark each one as delete, stop on a schedule or keep, and note who needs to confirm.
Minutes 15 to 25: right size what is running
Now look at the resources you are keeping. Each provider has a recommendation tool that flags the obvious cases:
- AWS: Compute Optimizer and Trusted Advisor.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure Advisor.
- Google Cloud: Recommender, including machine type and idle resource recommendations.
Look for servers and databases that rarely use more than a small share of their CPU or memory, storage kept in an expensive tier although it is rarely read, and logs with no retention limit. On AWS, for example, CloudWatch log groups keep data forever unless you set a retention period.
Data transfer deserves a quick look too. Traffic between regions and out to the internet is often charged, and one misconfigured service can move far more data than you expect.
Minutes 25 to 30: set guardrails
- Create a monthly budget with alerts, for example at 80 and 100 percent of the expected spend.
- Tag or label resources with an owner and an environment, so the next review is faster.
- Name one person who owns the cloud bill and reviews it every month.
- Put the next review in the calendar.
A simple rule
Anything without an owner is a candidate for removal. Ask around, give people a week to claim it, then stop it first and delete it only once you are sure nobody needs it.
What to leave for later
Some savings are real but need more than half an hour. Plan them once the quick wins are done.
| Change | Why it waits |
|---|---|
| Commitment discounts, such as AWS Savings Plans, Azure reservations or Google Cloud committed use discounts | Commit only after right sizing, or you lock in waste for one to three years |
| Moving to managed or serverless services | Needs testing, and can change how the application behaves |
| Architecture changes, such as caching or queues | Real savings at scale, but it is engineering work, not housekeeping |
| Switching cloud providers | For a small team, migration costs often outweigh the savings |
If the review turns up more than you have time to act on, a Magz cloud cost review goes through your accounts in depth, ranks every saving by effort and risk, and can make the changes with a rollback plan.
Want someone to run the review for you?
Send us a short note about your provider and your monthly spend. We will tell you whether a full review is likely to pay for itself.
About the author
Wendel Fernandes de Lana
Founder, Magz
Wendel Fernandes de Lana is the founder of Magz. He holds a Bachelor of Information Systems from the University of São Paulo, completed a summer executive course in digital business at California State University, Northridge, and has worked on web development, CRM automation and Apache AGE, the open source graph extension for PostgreSQL.