17 Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices for 2023

Cloud cost optimization involves maximizing resource efficiency in order to reduce cloud bills while balancing operational, compliance, security, and budgetary requirements. This process is essential as increased cloud adoption can lead to unused or incorrectly sized resources that waste budgets and cause overspends. Key best practices for cloud cost optimization include gaining visibility into costs, regularly auditing and removing unnecessary resources, right-sizing resources based on utilization, considering multi-cloud strategies, using appropriate storage classes, designing apps with a cloud-native architecture, setting alerts for cost spikes, evaluating different types of compute instances, periodically reviewing pricing changes, implementing data retention policies, managing software subscriptions and licenses, educating developers about costs, preventing shadow IT, automating the shutdown of development environments, minimizing network and bandwidth costs, reevaluating support plans, and utilizing cloud savings plans.