Cloud Cost Optimization Checklist

What this checklist is

A cloud cost checklist written for the engineers who create the spend, not only for finance. It covers seeing and allocating cost, budgets and anomaly alerts, rightsizing, autoscaling and scheduling, commitment discounts, storage lifecycle, data transfer, idle resources and unit cost metrics, each with a severity and a concrete way to verify it on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.

It has 9 chapters and 37 checks, each with how to verify it and how much it matters. For engineers who own cloud workloads and their bill.

Chapter by chapter

1. Visibility, tagging and allocation (6 checks)

Whether engineers can see what their services cost, and every line of the bill traces back to an owner.

2. Budgets and anomaly alerts (5 checks)

Whether unexpected spend is caught within a day by the team that caused it, not at the end of the month by finance.

3. Rightsizing (4 checks)

Whether the resources you pay for match what the workload actually uses.

4. Autoscaling and scheduling (4 checks)

Whether capacity follows demand, and resources that only matter during working hours are off the rest of the time.

5. Commitment discounts (3 checks)

Whether steady usage is covered by commitments that are actually used, without locking in waste.

6. Storage, logs and retention (4 checks)

Whether data moves to cheaper tiers or is deleted once it stops being useful, instead of growing forever.

7. Data transfer and egress (4 checks)

Whether traffic between zones, regions and the internet is understood, and avoidable transfer is designed out.

8. Idle resources and decommissioning (3 checks)

Whether resources are tracked over their lifetime and removed when the project, experiment or environment ends.

9. Unit costs and regular review (4 checks)

Whether cost is measured against what the business gets for it, and reviewed often enough to steer.

How it works on Sefism

The checklist is one page: each check has a severity (must, should or nice to have) and a concrete way to verify it, and members can tick checks off as they go. The opening chapters are open to everyone. Adding it to your account uses credits, opens every chapter and keeps your progress.

Every claim is checked against the sources listed on the page (8 cited).