Cloud Cost Optimization: 10 Things Developers Should Check Before Scaling

Scaling wasteful infrastructure only results in a massive cloud invoice. Optimize your existing stack before expanding capacity.

10 Cloud Cost Checklist Items

1. Right-Size Compute Instances: Downsize instances running under 15% average CPU. Migrate workloads to AWS Graviton (ARM) processors for up to 40% better price-performance.
2. Clean Up Unattached Resources: Delete orphaned EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IPs, old snapshots, and unused load balancers.
3. Optimize NAT Gateway Traffic: NAT Gateways charge per GB processed. Use VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB traffic to bypass NAT fees entirely.
4. Control Cross-AZ Data Transfer: Reduce multi-AZ data replication where unnecessary, and cache static assets via CloudFront CDN.
5. Leverage Savings Plans & RIs: Commit to baseline compute usage with Savings Plans to save up to 72% compared to On-Demand.
6. Use Spot Instances: Use EC2 Spot instances for stateless microservices, background queue processing, and batch jobs.
7. Enforce S3 Lifecycle Management: Transition older data to Infrequent Access or Glacier, and auto-abort incomplete multipart uploads.
8. Schedule Non-Production Environment Shutdowns: Automatically turn off staging and dev environments outside business hours.
9. Set CloudWatch Log Retention: Change log retention from "Never Expire" to 14 or 30 days and limit verbose debug logging in production.
10. Set Cost Budgets & Alerts: Configure AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection with Slack or email notifications.

What was your most surprising AWS bill item?