Wasted cloud spend is projected to hit $21 billion by 2021. That’s $21 billion dollars a year - or put another way, almost $2.4 million an hour - that companies could be putting toward their own growth and development, instead of wasting it on unused, idle or over-provisioned resources. There’s no need for this waste.

This Cloud Waste Checklist is a guide for your team to use in reviewing your own public cloud environment, so you can optimize spend and eliminate waste.

Wastepaper bin
– Getty Images

Orphaned Resources

Orphaned resources occur when a virtual machine is terminated, but resources attached to that machine continue running or existing, which incurs costs. Look for the following in your environment and terminate or reassign them:

  • Orphaned Snapshots of decommissioned systems
  • Orphaned Volumes such as Amazon EBS, Azure Virtual Disks, Block Storage in GCP, or Alibaba EBS
  • Unassociated IPs such as Elastic IPs in AWS, Static Public IPs in Azure, Static External IP addresses in GCP, or Elastic IPs in Alibaba Cloud
  • Load Balancers with no instances
  • Unused Machine Images such as AMIs in AWS, or images in Google Cloud or Alibaba Cloud
  • Orphaned Object Storage such as S3 buckets in AWS, Azure Block Blobs, Google Cloud Storage, or OSS in Alibaba Cloud

Overprovisioned Resources

Whether it’s because you selected the largest size by default or because your needs have changed, you may be paying for resources in much larger sizes than you actually need. Look at your usage data to see if you have any of the following eligible for rightsizing:

  • Underutilized Volumes such as Amazon EBS, Azure Virtual Disks, Block Storage in GCP, or Alibaba EBS
  • Underutilized Database Warehouses including Amazon Redshift, Google Cloud Datastore, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, or Alibaba MaxCompute
  • Underutilized Relational Databases such as Amazon RDS, Azure SQL, and Google Cloud SQL, or Apsara DB in Alibaba Cloud. This also includes databases with high redundancy where it is not really needed - multi-AZ databases where a single database is OK, or multiple read replicas
  • Underutilized Instances in Amazon EC2, Azure Virtual Machines, Google Compute Engine, or Alibaba ECS
  • Inefficient Containerization - turn off or consolidate containers that are not fully utilized
  • Idle Hosted Caching Tools such as Amazon ElastiCache, Azure Cache, Google Cloud Managed Redis, or ApsaraDB for Redis in Alibaba Cloud