What cloud cost optimization strategies have you found most effective in your organization? Are there specific techniques or best practices that have helped you reduce expenses without sacrificing the resources your teams need?

1. Revalidate business SLAs and value.
Periodically confirm that each solution still meets a justified business outcome for its cost and performance targets.
2. Evaluate technology and architecture upgrades.
Review your current architecture for modernization opportunities — newer services, serverless patterns, or container orchestration can often deliver the same outcome with lower spend.
3. Migrate from IaaS to PaaS where possible.
Platform services reduce operational overhead, simplify scaling, and often provide better cost efficiency compared to virtual machine–based deployments.
4. Leverage cloud vendor optimization programs.
Most providers offer native tools and advisory programs that analyze usage patterns and suggest improvements — e.g., right-sizing, auto-scaling, Just-In-Time (JIT) provisioning, and burst capacity configurations.
5. Negotiate pricing and commit to annual usage.
Review consumption trends and engage your vendor for enterprise or reserved-capacity discounts based on projected annual usage.

Optimisation starts with the design; plan for elastic scaling, match robustness and reliability requirements with specific services and features, make a bill of materials with cloud costs a key part of design sign-off. In lieu of solid requirements, one principle that helps is to under, not over, provision. Don't deploy a higher SKU because of some special feature with no immediate plan to use, don't deploy with extra compute capacity until proven it's needed, don't tick the box for geo-replicated data (as easy as it may be) unless you have a DR process to use it.

Reserved instances, ensuring workloads are automated to scale up/down based on usage, shutting down and starting up non production services/environments to only hours when used are a few things we have found effective.