Where cloud waste hides
The usual sources are predictable. Idle or oversized virtual machines, databases provisioned for peaks that never happen, unattached volumes and old snapshots, development environments running at night, load balancers with no traffic and data transfer between regions or out to the internet that nobody planned for. Data egress and inter-zone traffic are often hidden in generic lines of the bill, so we trace them to the services that cause them.
Architecture drives the larger numbers: chatty services crossing availability zones, logs retained forever at premium storage rates, always-on workloads that could be serverless or scheduled, and managed services used in ways that bill per request at high volume. We examine bills line by line, using cost explorer tools and resource utilization data, to separate real waste from deliberate headroom. Each recommendation is checked against real utilization data first.
