Reducing the cost of cloud: Tips for reducing your spend at any cloud provider

Spiraling costs are causing organizations to look for ways to reduce their monthly spend – hidden charges and unexpected bills are surprises that CFOs can no longer afford.

With 34% of cloud developers struggling to calculate their monthly charges, the promise of low-cost scalability often results in "bill sting."

There are, however, a number of tips and tricks that you can action today that will help you reduce your cloud bill at any provider. By implementing cloud cost management, the process of monitoring, controlling, and optimizing spend, you can eliminate unnecessary expenses and ensure you are only paying for the value you receive.

Organizational culture

Across organizations, we're seeing leaders redefine their company culture and encourage a collaborative relationship between their CFO and financial teams and developers. This relationship is emerging under the umbrella term of FinOps. Similar to the uptake of a DevOps approach, businesses must now encourage the different branches of their finance teams and developer teams to come together to build a new approach to cloud.

Whilst cloud cost can seem like a purely financial issue, it is also closely tied to your developer team's actions, so expanding the responsibility of financial management to involve your developers is an important first step. This includes implementing software development best practices such as DevOps and GitOps to help build a cost-effective cloud application architecture from the start.

By providing your employees with training and educate them on the best metrics they should analyze to provide all teams with the information they need to make data-driven spending decisions. With the right communication, you can display your current spend, whether through a dashboard or other tool, across each action from each team and ensure it fits within the budgets allocated per team and project.

If done successfully, this approach will enable you to manage increasing expenses gradually. You’ll be equipped with the right data to budget for planned projects and avoid sudden, and unexpected, costs as your company grows and increases its cloud usage.

Identifying the hidden traps in your bill

There are four common areas across all cloud vendors that risk running up your bill. Luckily, these are things that can be managed and observed by your team. By putting mechanisms in place to tune these parameters, you can ensure you're reducing the chance that your provider has snuck hidden charges into your monthly bill that you're unaware of.

Compute

A common misconception is that when you delete compute, its associated volume is removed. However, this is not mandatory. If a member of your team isn’t trained to spot this, you risk these orphaned volumes running in the background and entering the bill every month. Beyond simple resource management, poor cloud application architecture design can silently inflate costs. Specific design choices, such as adding unnecessary queries, heavy widgets, or redundant data processing to a web application, can exponentially increase the resources required to run it.

While some cloud providers offer built-in "optimizer" tools or recommender systems to analyze your usage patterns, these often act as a band-aid for inherently complex and opaque billing structures. Instead of relying on proprietary tools to decode a confusing bill, the most effective strategy is to combine granular logs and monitoring with a provider that offers predictable, transparent pricing. By focusing on efficient architecture from the start of the software development life cycle, you can monitor and fine-tune your usage across specific projects without needing a hyperscaler’s "recommender" to tell you where your money is going.

Network

Remember that every IP address is chargeable. Your provider will charge you if you do not delete the reserved IP or when you delete the instance but do not remove the reserved IPs. It is important, therefore, that you have a system in place to monitor any unattached IP addresses that are still within your network because they’ll be contributing to your monthly bill.

Data transfers across cloud and regions can be costly, but this won’t appear on a pricing calculator. So, before sharing large quantities of data, make sure you know the associated cost to avoid being caught unaware.

Storage

From a Kubernetes perspective, you must ensure you don't have any unattached PVs. Whenever you create a Persistent Volume, this can be backed up by EBS or some other volume, so if you delete this, it doesn't necessarily mean that the PV goes away – so you could be charged.

Make sure you're sanity-checking your extra volumes and that you don't have any sitting there, adding to your bill but doing nothing. Retention policies are great ways to reduce your chance of building up snapshots and logs you're not using. With Kubernetes, if you keep every metric generated, your workload cost will get out of hand. Instead, check through each recording process and streamline this to incorporate only the metrics that you need, and delete any unnecessary additions.

Kubernetes

Even if you don't run any nodes or workloads, you'll still be charged extra due to the controlplane charge. Correct sizing of your workloads by using their requests and limits can make best use of your nodes, and the cluster autoscaler feature can also be used to avoid overprovisioning of the nodes.

To manage external traffic effectively, Load Balancers are essential; however, they often come with a flat hourly fee regardless of traffic volume. To optimize these costs, consider using an Ingress Controller to route multiple services through a single Load Balancer rather than spinning up a unique Load Balancer for every individual service.

In the long run, you can analyze traffic patterns and use open-source tooling like KEDA to perform more advanced event-driven autoscaling, ensuring your infrastructure scales up only when there is a genuine spike and scales back down to save costs immediately after.

Cloud cost management strategies

To maximize savings, you need consistent strategies that allow you to identify overspending and align with business goals.

• Monitoring and observability: One of the biggest challenges in cloud cost management is the lack of monitoring and observability practices. Effective monitoring allows you to scale instances according to business needs and identify hidden costs. This improves your overall strategy, scalability, and security by identifying potential threats early.
• Eliminate underutilized resources: Idle resources are a significant concern. The best way to reduce these is through auto-scaling, ensuring your environment shrinks during low-traffic periods.
• Compare providers: In our research, we found that 82% of cloud developers believe the big three hyperscalers should reduce their costs. Comparing providers allows you to find upfront, predictable pricing models, like Civo's, that prevent the "sticker shock" of traditional cloud billing.
• Regular strategy reviews: With 74% of businesses seeing an increase in cloud usage, you should regularly establish policies for managing costs, such as setting budget targets and providing ongoing team training.

Using the right tools

Putting these parameters into place may appear complicated, but there are already several tools available that you can deploy to make monitoring these areas simpler. For example, Komiser or Kubecost. There are also tools Goldilocks that can recommend the right sizing of resources and KEDA that can help you with advanced auto scaling within Kubernetes.

Most tools rely on giving you a clear overview of the resources you're using and allow you to sanity check where your money is going. Komiser, for example, can draw information from multiple cloud providers, if this is your chosen cloud model, and relay your relevant costs under one unified view. This can then be saved and downloaded as separate reports.

Crucially, these tools show you exactly what you're spending across each service. So if you're looking to manage your cost, this is an essential foundation that breaks down precisely what your provider is charging you and why.

Final insights

With rising costs, you shouldn't allow hyperscaler providers to seize the advantage. Instead, incorporate awareness of these financial practices at all levels of your organization and begin work now.

Building these tricks into daily practice may seem complicated, but if you make them habitual, you'll give yourself the best safeguards to predict your costs and projects into the future. There are four things that I'd recommend that you look to implement from today:

• Set budget allocations per project
• Set a budget and billing alert monthly
• Make sure your logs and metrics data do not overpopulate
• Bring in company policy training to build in FinOps

Of course, FinOps is designed to incorporate the best working practices into your organization – not necessarily reduce your costs. However, when combined with the right tools, you can build an accurate picture of your costs and work to manage your monthly charges.

Another method for reducing costs is to look beyond the traditional big 3 hyperscalers. Civo is dedicated to restoring transparency to the cloud, offering competitive pricing that is often less than 75% of what other hyperscalers charge, alongside a generous data transfer allowance and free DDoS protection

If you're interested in learning more about the cost of cloud, the current state of the industry, and insights and tools to drive innovation, then check out some of our latest resources:

• Why the cloud does not have to be a costly venture
• The cost of cloud: 5 takeaways
• The egress fee trap: How hyperscalers hurt customers and stifle innovation