DevOps · interactive

Understanding the cloud bill

A typical monthly bill, line by line. Compute is the obvious cost, but networking (NAT gateways, data transfer out) and logs often surprise people. Apply common fixes and watch what moves. Figures are illustrative.

Compute (VMs, containers)$6,200
Managed databases$3,100
NAT gateway data processing$1,400
Data transfer out$1,800
Object storage$900
Logs and metrics$1,600

$15,000/mo

Before optimising anything, tag resources by team and service so you can see who spends what.

Right-size oversized instances−30%Savings plan / reserved capacity−28%VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB−75%Serve assets through a CDN−45%Move old objects to cold storage−55%Shorter log retention, drop debug logs−60%

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Tag everything by team, service and environment; review the bill by tag monthly.
Cost Explorer, Kubecost, Infracost in PRs.
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In production

Tools and technologies

FinOps tools break the bill down by team and service.

Not tied to one language — use these names when you search docs or design a system.