FinOps: where cloud bills actually leak
The same handful of line items account for most wasted hosting spend — and none of them are the servers themselves.
Everyone assumes the cloud bill is compute. In forty-odd cost audits it rarely is.
The recurring offenders: cross-AZ data transfer nobody modelled, orphaned snapshots and volumes, over-provisioned managed databases running at 8% utilisation, logging pipelines ingesting debug output at production volume, and NAT gateway charges from services that never needed egress.
We cut one client's bill 41% without touching a single instance type. The work was mapping data flow and deleting what nothing referenced.
Governance matters more than the one-off cut. Budgets, anomaly alerts and tagging discipline are what stop the bill climbing back within two quarters.
An engineer replies within one working day — not a sales sequence.
