Cloud Cost Quick Wins for Year-End

Global cloud spend hits $720 billion in 2025—and organizations waste 20-30% on unused resources. Year-end is the perfect time to show savings before budgets reset.

In this episode, Jordan and Alex deliver six actionable quick wins you can implement THIS WEEK:

💰 The Six Wins:
1️⃣ Scheduling non-prod environments → 70% savings
2️⃣ Right-sizing oversized instances → 25-40% per instance
3️⃣ Reserved Instances/Savings Plans → Up to 72% discount
4️⃣ Spot instances for CI/CD → 60-90% savings
5️⃣ Storage tiering → Move cold data to Glacier
6️⃣ Zombie resource hunt → $500-2K/month per account

📋 Monday Morning Checklist:
• Run cloud cost analyzer (30 min)
• Find top 5 zombie resources (1 hr)
• Schedule one non-prod environment (2 hrs)
• Present findings to manager (30 min)

📰 News Segment:
• Envoy v1.36.3: Three CVEs including request smuggling - PATCH NOW
• Loki Operator 0.9.0: Automatic NetworkPolicy deployment
• AWS Graviton5 M9g: 25-35% performance improvements (preview)
• Uncloud: Deploy containers without Kubernetes complexity

🔗 Full episode page with transcript: https://platformengineering.org/podcasts/00046-cloud-cost-quick-wins-year-end

#PlatformEngineering #FinOps #CloudCosts #DevOps #Kubernetes #CloudOptimization