5 Cloud Strategies That Cut Costs — Without Cutting Corners

Aug 2
3 min read

Cloud bills can quietly become monsters.

At Ananta Cloud, we’ve seen companies overpay by 30–40% simply because no one was watching usage closely.

The truth is: scaling in the cloud doesn't mean spending without control. You can reduce cloud costs significantly without sacrificing performance, reliability, or future flexibility.

Here are five proven cloud cost optimization strategies we’ve used to help clients cut expenses by up to 45%—without disrupting workflows or degrading service quality.

1 Eliminate Unused Resources

Old virtual machines, unattached IP addresses, idle load balancers—these "cloud zombies" silently drain your budget.

In multi-account, multi-region environments, it’s common to forget to decommission:

Legacy EC2 instances used for temporary tests
Orphaned EBS volumes
Elastic IPs assigned to terminated instances
Load balancers with no active listeners

What to do: Set up automated discovery and cleanup scripts or use tools like AWS Trusted Advisor or Azure Advisor to identify unused assets. Make it part of your monthly ops hygiene.

2 Optimize Capacity (Right-Sizing)

Overprovisioning is the most common and most expensive cloud mistake. Many teams launch compute instances or allocate storage based on peak estimations or guesswork.

We’ve seen:

16-core VMs running at 5% CPU
Persistent disks at 10% utilization
Containers with massive memory requests they never use

What to do: Use cloud-native monitoring (like CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or GCP Ops) to track real usage patterns. Then right-size compute/storage or introduce autoscaling to match demand dynamically.

Tools like AWS Compute Optimizer, Azure Advisor, or GCP Recommender can suggest instance families better suited to your workloads.

3 Rethink Transit Costs

Inter-region data transfer, NAT gateways, and transit gateways can quietly rack up thousands in monthly spend—especially in hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.

What to do:

For internal communication, prefer VPC peering or Private Service Connect over more costly transit gateways.
Use storage endpoints for S3/GCS/Azure Blob access within the same region to avoid unnecessary public egress.
Always monitor data transfer patterns across services and regions.

This not only cuts cost but often improves latency and performance as well.

4 Minimize NAT Gateway Usage

NAT Gateways are convenient for routing traffic from private subnets—but they’re not cheap. At scale, they can become one of your top networking costs.

What to do:

Where possible, replace NAT Gateways with VPC Endpoints or Internet Gateways for specific services that don't require high security constraints.
Use private subnets for outbound access only when necessary.
Consider consolidating traffic through fewer gateways or exploring open-source NAT alternatives (with caution).

5 Optimize Interconnect

In multi-region, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud setups, interconnect costs—including private links, VPNs, or Direct Connect circuits—can become a significant line item if not managed wisely.

What to do:

Audit interconnect usage regularly. Often, expensive dedicated links are underutilized or used for traffic that could move via optimized public channels with encryption.
Use compression, deduplication, or content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce cross-region data transfers.
Consider whether cloud-native interconnect solutions (like Google Cloud Interconnect, Azure ExpressRoute, or AWS Direct Connect) are right-sized and properly tiered.
Consolidate traffic paths or redesign data flows to avoid unnecessary inter-region hops.

You don’t always need to rip and replace—sometimes it's about adjusting bandwidth, terminating redundant circuits, or simply rerouting traffic more efficiently.

6 Cut Monitoring Overhead

Observability is critical—but it’s easy to overspend. Many third-party logging and APM tools charge per GB or TB of ingestion, storage, or queries. This can scale fast in environments with verbose logs or heavy traffic.

What to do:

Enable sampling for traces and logs.
Drop low-priority or debug logs in production.
Move cold logs to cheaper long-term storage (like S3 Glacier).
Evaluate cost-effective tools like Grafana Loki, OpenTelemetry, or native cloud logging alternatives.

You don’t have to compromise visibility to control costs—you just need a smarter setup.