March 12, 2026 · Advena Team
The cloud cost checklist we run before every audit
Most cloud bills hide the same handful of wins. Here are the items we look at first — and what they typically save.
Cloud bills are a great mirror of engineering decisions made years ago that no one has revisited. Before recommending anything complicated, we walk the bill against a short checklist. Most accounts have 20–40% of spend that comes out without rewriting a single line of code.
1. Idle and forgotten resources
Old EBS volumes detached from terminated instances. Test environments running 24/7 that no one uses. Load balancers in front of services that were retired six months ago. A monthly sweep of resources with zero traffic in the last 30 days routinely surfaces real spend.
2. Right-sizing and graviton
Most workloads run on instance types chosen during the original deploy and never revisited. Compute optimizer data plus a few hours of analysis usually finds 20–30% savings from right-sizing alone. On AWS, switching to Graviton is often another 20% on top — many workloads need no code changes.
3. Storage class and lifecycle
S3 buckets that hold years of archival data on Standard pricing. Snapshots kept forever "just in case." Logs in CloudWatch with no retention policy. A lifecycle policy that moves cold data to Glacier or deletes after N days is one of the highest-ROI changes you can make.
4. Commit-based discounts
If you're running on-demand instances at steady state, you're leaving 20–40% on the table. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances are paperwork wins, but they require enough confidence in your forecast to commit. A short capacity-planning exercise pays for itself in the first month.
5. Cross-account egress and NAT
Cross-AZ traffic and NAT gateway data processing are silent killers. Architectures that chatter across availability zones or send all egress through a single NAT can show up as thousands per month in line items most teams don't recognize. VPC endpoints and architectural changes typically clear most of it.
None of these require a big project. The hardest part is finding the time to look. If your bill keeps growing faster than your business and you want a second set of eyes, that's the kind of focused assessment we do all the time.