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Cost Management

The process of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing cloud spending to ensure maximum value and prevent budget overruns.

Categorycloud

Overview

Cloud cost management (often part of a FinOps practice) involves using tools and processes to gain visibility into cloud spending and identifying opportunities to reduce waste. Because cloud costs are variable, active management is essential.

Key Activities

  • Cost Visualization: Using dashboards to see where money is being spent.
  • Right-sizing: Ensuring that resources (like VMs) are not larger than necessary for their workload.
  • Identifying Idle Resources: Finding and deleting unused volumes, snapshots, or instances.
  • Using Discount Programs: Leveraging reserved capacity or spot instances.

Tools

  • AWS Cost Explorer
  • Google Cloud Cost Management
  • Azure Cost Management + Billing

Related Terms

Resource TaggingBudget AlertsReserved Capacity