How to cut cloud spend by 30% without breaking anything

Cloud bills creep, they never jump

Almost no company overspends on cloud in one dramatic mistake. Bills creep: a test environment left running, a database sized for a launch spike, storage accumulating snapshots nobody will ever restore.

The good news is that creep is reversible — and the first pass usually finds 20–30% in a single week.

Move one: right-size the loud resources

Pull 30 days of utilisation data. Any instance averaging under 15% CPU is a candidate to halve. Databases and Kubernetes nodes are usually the biggest wins — they are sized for peaks that arrive twice a year.

Move two: schedule the non-production estate

• Dev, test and staging off outside working hours — that alone is ~65% of their cost
• Automate the schedule so nobody has to remember
• Give developers a one-click way to wake an environment when needed

Move three: tier your storage

Backups and logs older than 30 days rarely need hot storage. Moving them to cool or archive tiers typically cuts storage spend by half — with zero change to your applications.

Aura's cloud cost review delivers exactly this: a written findings list, savings estimates per change, and implementation if you want it.