Every cost review I've run starts the same way: someone suggests reserved instances, and that's the whole conversation. Reserved instances matter, but they're rarely where the real waste is hiding.
The first place I look is orphaned resources — disks attached to VMs that were deleted months ago, public IPs nobody's using, snapshots nobody remembers taking. None of these show up on a dashboard unless you go looking.
The second is storage tiering. Data that hasn't been touched in 90 days sitting in hot-tier blob storage is a quiet, compounding cost. Lifecycle policies that move it to cool or archive tiers automatically pay for themselves within a quarter.
Autoscaling rules deserve a second look too — teams often set a minimum instance count out of caution and never revisit it once traffic patterns are understood.
The least glamorous lever, but often the biggest: rightsizing VMs. A team that provisioned for a launch spike eighteen months ago is very rarely still running the workload that justified that size.
Written by Raj
Raj spent seven years as a cloud infrastructure engineer managing production Azure environments before becoming a full-time AI trainer.
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