Cloud Cost Optimization Checklist
A FinOps checklist that reduces cloud spend through tagging visibility, waste removal, rightsizing, commitments, and storage tiering, with guardrails to protect SLOs and a recurring review cadence.
When to Use This Checklist
Use this when cloud spend is rising faster than usage, when finance asks for a cost-reduction plan, or as a quarterly hygiene exercise. It applies to any provider and follows FinOps principles: inform, optimize, operate. The goal is durable savings that do not compromise reliability.
Cost optimization is a practice, not a one-off cleanup. This checklist sets up both the immediate wins and the ongoing cadence.
How to Use This Checklist
Start with visibility: you cannot optimize what you cannot see. Get tagging coverage high and build a breakdown by team, environment, and service. Then pursue waste reduction (idle and orphaned resources) before rate optimization (commitments), because committing to oversized resources locks in waste.
Involve engineering owners directly; FinOps fails when it is finance dictating to engineers. Validate after every change that SLOs still hold, and set a recurring review so savings do not erode.
What Good Looks Like
A cost-optimized estate has near-complete tag coverage, a dashboard everyone trusts, and no idle or orphaned resources. Compute and databases are rightsized to real utilization, stable load is covered by commitments, and bursty or fault-tolerant work runs on spot capacity. Storage is tiered automatically, budgets and anomaly alerts are live, and a regular FinOps review keeps engineering accountable. SLOs are unchanged.
Common Pitfalls
The classic mistake is buying reservations or savings plans for resources that should have been rightsized or deleted first, locking in the waste. Another is chasing cost so hard that reliability suffers, for example removing redundancy to save money. Tagging gaps make any breakdown untrustworthy. Ignoring data-egress and cross-zone costs hides a large bill. Finally, one-off cleanups without a recurring cadence let spend creep straight back up.
Related Resources
Ground the work in FinOps best practices and the cost-allocation and tagging practice. Use the well-architected cost and sustainability pillars for provider-specific levers, and SLOs to make sure savings never cross the reliability line.