Cutting cloud spend without cutting corners

Cloud bills grow the way clutter does: one reasonable decision at a time. The audit that fixes it is not clever, it is patient.

Where the money actually was

• Idle GPU capacity held for a training job that finished in March
• Three environments where the staging one had production-sized instances
• Logs retained for seven years because nobody chose a number

What we left alone

Backups, replicas and the on-call alerting path. Savings that show up as an outage are not savings, and the first person to discover the trade was made would be a customer.