# Cloud Cost Review — Sample

**This is an illustrative example.** The organisation, workloads and figures are invented to
show the shape of a review that produces decisions. Copy the structure; your numbers will be
different.

The review separates three things that get muddled in every cost conversation: **waste**
(spend for nothing), **inefficiency** (spend for more than needed), and **placement** (a
workload paying rental rates for something it uses constantly). They have different fixes and
very different effort.

---

## Cloud cost review — July 2026

| | |
|---|---|
| Period | July 2026, against a 6-month trend |
| Scope | All accounts, one provider |
| Prepared by | Platform team |
| Reviewed with | Engineering leads and the finance business partner |

## 1. Where the money goes

| Line item | July | 6-month trend | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute — production | $41,200 | flat | 38% |
| Compute — non-production | $18,600 | rising | 17% |
| Managed database | $16,900 | rising | 16% |
| Data transfer out | $12,400 | rising sharply | 11% |
| Storage and snapshots | $9,100 | rising | 8% |
| NAT gateway | $5,300 | flat | 5% |
| Everything else | $4,900 | flat | 5% |
| **Total** | **$108,400** | +19% over 6 months | |

Volume served grew 6% over the same period. **Spend grew three times faster than the thing
it pays for**, which is the sentence this review exists to produce.

## 2. Waste — spend returning nothing

| Item | Monthly | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Non-production running nights and weekends | $11,400 | A scheduler. One day. |
| Unattached storage volumes (61 of them) | $2,850 | Delete. One afternoon. |
| Snapshots with no retention policy, oldest from 2023 | $2,100 | Policy + one cleanup |
| Load balancers with no traffic for 90 days | $740 | Delete after owner confirms |
| Idle IP addresses | $310 | Delete |
| **Total** | **$17,400** | ~2 days of work |

**Sixteen per cent of the bill, and none of it requires an architecture change.** The
non-production figure alone is the largest single saving available, and it is a scheduled
task.

The 61 unattached volumes are worth a note. Nobody deleted them because nobody could
establish whose they were — none carry an owner tag. That is why the tagging recommendation
below is not administrative housekeeping.

## 3. Inefficiency — paying for more than is used

| Item | Current | Measured need | Monthly saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application tier sized from the original estimate | 24 instances | 14 at peak | $6,900 |
| Managed database on the largest tier | — | Peak CPU 22% | $4,100 |
| Cross-zone traffic from a service talking to itself | — | Avoidable | $1,800 |
| Logs retained 12 months, queried back 14 days | — | 30-day policy | $1,200 |
| **Total** | | | **$14,000** |

Right-sizing needs measurement rather than opinion, and the measurements are already
available — this is a week of careful work, not a project.

## 4. Placement — the workload in the wrong place

One workload accounts for a disproportionate share and is not waste. It is correctly built,
fully used, and paying rental rates for something it uses every hour of every day.

| Batch processing cluster | |
|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $22,700 |
| Utilisation | 78% average, 24 hours a day |
| Load pattern | Steady, predictable, no seasonality |
| Data egress | 41 TB per month |
| Expected lifetime | Years — it is core to the product |
| Owned equivalent | ~$180,000 up front, ~$3,400 monthly running |

On these figures the crossover is under a year. **This is the one item in the review that is
a decision rather than a task**, and it belongs to the owner, not to the platform team. It
also carries a portability question: if it moves, it must remain movable.

Note what is *not* being proposed. Nothing else in the estate has this profile. Variable
workloads, new services and anything that might not exist in six months stay where they are.

## 5. Cost controls

| Control | Status |
|---|---|
| Budget alerts | Set at 80% and 100%, per account |
| Mandatory tags — owner, environment, cost centre | **Not enforced** — 34% of resources untagged |
| Non-production off out of hours | **Not implemented** |
| Retention policies on logs and snapshots | **Partial** — logs only |
| Named owner for the bill | **No** |

The two blanks in the middle are the two largest savings in this review. That is not a
coincidence: uncontrolled cost is a governance outcome before it is a technical one.

## 6. Summary

| | Monthly | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Waste | $17,400 | 2 days |
| Inefficiency | $14,000 | 1 week |
| **Available without an architecture change** | **$31,400** | **29% of the bill** |
| Placement decision (separate) | up to $19,300 | Owner decision + a project |

## 7. Recommendations

1. **Schedule non-production off outside working hours** — one day, $11,400 a month.
2. **Enforce tagging**, and make untagged resources subject to deletion after notice. Without
   this, the cleanup below has to be repeated every quarter.
3. **Delete the identified orphans** — volumes, snapshots, load balancers, addresses.
4. **Right-size against measured usage**, starting with the application tier and the database.
5. **Name an owner for the bill.** Every controlled estate has one; no uncontrolled estate does.
6. **Take the batch cluster to the owner as a placement decision** with these figures. Do not
   fold it into the technical actions above.

---

## Notes on using this format

**Separate waste, inefficiency and placement.** Combined, they produce one intimidating
number and no action. Separated, most of the saving turns out to need a day and a scheduler.

**Put effort next to every saving.** It is what makes the order obvious and stops the review
becoming a wish list.

**Compare spend growth to the thing it pays for.** A bill that grows with the business is not
a problem. Growing three times faster is, and neither number means anything alone.