INFRASTRUCTURE COST OPTIMISATION
Cut Cloud Bills by 20-40%
Cut cloud bills without sacrificing performance. Right-sizing, reserved instances, spot workloads, waste elimination backed by continuous monitoring and governance.
WHAT IS COST OPTIMISATION
Most cloud environments carry 30-50% waste: over-provisioned instances, idle resources, inefficient storage tiers, and unoptimised networking. We identify every pound wasted and implement proven strategies to eliminate it without degrading performance.
KEY SERVICES
Right-Sizing Analysis
Most cloud environments run at typically 30-40% utilisation, yet you pay for 100% capacity. Right-sizing matches instance types to actual workload requirements, analysing CPU, memory, and network patterns over time. This eliminates over-provisioning whilst ensuring performance remains acceptable. We benchmark your infrastructure against current-generation instance families to identify cost-efficient alternatives that often perform better than legacy types.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Reserved instances and savings plans offer up to 75% discount compared to on-demand pricing when you commit to one or three-year terms. We analyse your baseline usage to determine optimal commitment levels, balancing cost savings against operational flexibility. Savings plans provide similar discounts with more flexibility across instance types and regions, making them ideal for dynamic workloads. This approach locks in predictable pricing for steady-state infrastructure.
Spot Instances
Spot instances offer up to 90% discount compared to on-demand pricing by using spare cloud capacity. Whilst they can be interrupted with short notice, they work brilliantly for batch processing, development environments, and fault-tolerant workloads. We design graceful degradation strategies so your applications handle interruptions without data loss. Combining spot instances with auto-scaling groups ensures cost-effective capacity whilst maintaining service availability.
Waste Identification and Elimination
We audit your infrastructure to identify significant waste from idle resources, unattached storage, and obsolete development environments. This includes unattached EBS volumes, unused elastic IPs, forgotten load balancers, and development instances running outside business hours. Tagging strategies reveal orphaned resources with no clear owner. Automated cleanup policies prevent waste from accumulating again after the initial audit.
Auto-Scaling Configuration
Auto-scaling dynamically adjusts capacity to match actual demand, eliminating waste during quiet periods whilst maintaining performance during peaks. We configure scaling policies based on CPU, memory, request rates, or custom metrics that reflect your application behaviour. Scheduled scaling handles predictable patterns like business hours or seasonal traffic. Combined with right-sized instances, auto-scaling delivers typical 15-40% cost savings compared to static capacity provisioned for worst-case scenarios.
Storage Tier Optimisation
Cloud storage offers multiple tiers with vastly different pricing: frequently accessed data costs more than infrequently accessed archives. We analyse access patterns to identify data that should move to cheaper storage classes like S3 Infrequent Access, Glacier, or Azure Cool/Archive tiers. Lifecycle policies automate transitions based on age and access frequency. For databases, smaller instance types often suffice when paired with provisioned IOPS rather than over-provisioning compute.
Network Traffic Optimisation
Network costs often represent significant spend, yet many organisations ignore these costs until they become problematic. We optimise traffic routing to minimise expensive cross-region data transfer, leverage CDNs to reduce origin bandwidth, and identify chatty services that generate unnecessary network usage. VPC peering and private connectivity options reduce costs compared to public internet routing for inter-service communication.
Continuous Cost Monitoring
Real-time cost dashboards show spending by service, team, and project through comprehensive tagging strategies. Anomaly detection alerts you to unexpected spikes before they escalate into budget overruns. Budget thresholds trigger notifications at 50%, 75%, and 90% of monthly limits. Daily cost reports reveal gradual drift that might otherwise go unnoticed.
METHODOLOGY
Audit and Strategy
Analyse current spend patterns, identify waste, and benchmark against industry standards. Develop prioritised recommendations across compute, storage, and networking that balance cost savings against performance requirements.
Implementation and Testing
Execute right-sizing, implement reserved instances, configure auto-scaling. Validate performance remains acceptable through rigorous load testing before production deployment.
Monitoring and Governance
Set up cost alerts, usage dashboards, and monthly reviews. Establish policies and guardrails to prevent cost drift whilst maintaining team autonomy within defined boundaries.
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Cost optimisation typically delivers:
- 20-60% cost reduction
- 90-day payback period on optimisation work
- Improved performance through efficient resource allocation
- Predictable budgeting through reserved capacity
- Waste elimination without service degradation
- Real-time cost visibility and anomaly detection
- Enterprise governance frameworks
Typical savings range from £30,000 to £150,000+ annually depending on infrastructure size.
COST REDUCTION PRIORITIES
We prioritise optimisations by:
- Impact: What will save the most money?
- Risk: What can we implement without service impact?
- Effort: How quickly can we implement?
- Payback: What delivers fastest ROI?
Quick wins like right-sizing and waste elimination typically deliver 20-40% savings immediately. Reserved instances and savings plans provide additional 10-20% savings over time.
TIMELINE
Initial cost audit: 1-2 weeks
Quick wins implementation: 2-4 weeks
Reserved instances procurement: 4-6 weeks
Continuous monitoring: Ongoing
COST OPTIMISATION IN DETAIL
Right-Sizing Strategy
Right-sizing is the easiest win in cloud cost reduction:
Underutilised instances represent pure waste. An instance sized for peak load that runs at 20% average utilisation is oversized. We recommend downgrading to smaller instances without performance degradation.
Instance type selection dramatically affects cost. Older generation instances cost more than current-generation alternatives. Migration from m5 to m6i saves 15% whilst improving performance.
ARM-based graviton instances offer 20-30% cost savings compared to x86 for compatible workloads.
Reserved Instance Strategy
Reserved instances provide long-term cost certainty:
One-year reservations: 30-40% discount
Three-year reservations: 50-60% discount
We analyse your usage patterns to determine optimal commitment levels. Over-committing wastes money on unused capacity. Under-committing misses discounts.
Savings plans provide more flexibility than reserved instances, covering instance type changes and region changes.
Spot Instance Implementation
Spot instances offer 70-90% discount compared to on-demand pricing:
Suitable for batch processing, data analysis, machine learning training, and development environments. Unsuitable for production applications requiring immediate response.
Spot fleet groups manage multiple spot instances across instance types and availability zones for resilience.
Graceful shutdown ensures clean termination when spot instances are reclaimed.
Waste Elimination Details
Infrastructure carries significant waste:
Orphaned resources: Unattached EBS volumes, unused elastic IPs, forgotten load balancers often persist long after they're needed. Tagging strategies identify owners, enabling cleanup decisions.
Development environments: Test servers and staging environments often run 24/7 despite only needing resources during business hours. Automated shutdown reduces costs 70-80%.
Unoptimised networking: Cross-region data transfer costs significantly more than same-region traffic. VPC peering and private connectivity reduce costs.
Storage waste: Large backups retained longer than needed. Tiered storage moving old data to cheaper storage classes.
AUTO-SCALING TUNING
Properly tuned auto-scaling reduces waste:
Scaling policies respond to demand within 30-60 seconds. CPU-based scaling works well for compute-intensive workloads. Request-based scaling works better for web services. Custom metrics enable business-driven scaling.
Predictable scaling for known patterns (business hours, seasonal traffic) reduces unnecessary churn.
Cost-optimisation configurations target aggressive downscaling to near-zero during quiet periods, with rapid upscaling when demand increases.
STORAGE OPTIMISATION
Storage represents a smaller percentage of cloud spend but offers optimisation opportunities:
S3 storage classes:
- Standard: Most expensive, used for active data
- Infrequent Access: 40% cheaper, suitable for backups older than 30 days
- Glacier: 70% cheaper, suitable for archival data older than 1 year
- Glacier Deep Archive: 80% cheaper, suitable for multi-year retention
Lifecycle policies automatically transition data between storage classes based on age, without manual intervention.
NETWORK COST REDUCTION
Network costs often represent 5-15% of cloud spend:
VPC peering and AWS PrivateLink reduce costs compared to internet-based traffic. NAT gateway costs accumulate quickly on outbound traffic; bastion hosts can reduce costs 90% for specific use cases.
CDN placement reduces bandwidth costs by serving content from edge locations. Origin shielding reduces origin bandwidth for popular content.
Data transfer costs vary by direction and destination. Analyse actual data flows to identify optimisation opportunities.
COST ALLOCATION
Transparent cost allocation enables teams to reduce waste:
Comprehensive tagging identifies cost by team, project, and environment. Cost centre allocations let teams understand their infrastructure spending.
Monthly cost reports by service reveal which components consume budget. Monthly reviews with teams enable collaborative cost reduction.
Budget alerts prevent surprise cost overruns. Automating resource cleanup prevents costs from growing unchecked.
BUSINESS CASE
Cost optimisation delivers multiple benefits:
Immediate savings: 20-40% through right-sizing and waste elimination
Ongoing savings: 10-20% annually through reserved instances and spot instances
Performance improvement: Better resource allocation improves performance
Predictability: Reserved capacity provides budget certainty
The ROI on cost optimisation is typically 1-3 months, after which it's pure savings.
TEAM ENABLEMENT
Cost optimisation requires team engagement:
Training: Help teams understand cloud costs and optimisation opportunities
Tools: Provide visibility into spending and cost-saving opportunities
Governance: Define guardrails preventing cost growth whilst maintaining flexibility
Accountability: Help teams own their infrastructure costs
Teams that understand cloud costs naturally make more cost-effective decisions.
CONTACT
Get a free cost audit to identify your savings opportunities.
