Reduce cloud spend

Cloud cost advice is usually a generic list ("use spot", "rightsize", "buy reservations") with no link to the actual bill. Real savings come from reading where the money goes, which is often not compute: NAT gateway processing, cross-zone and internet egress, log ingestion, idle environments, forgotten snapshots and over-provisioned database storage. Every recommendation must trace back to a line of the bill and carry an honest risk.

Find savings in this bill: [BILL_EXPORT] Only if [ARCHITECTURE] is given: Architecture and usage: [ARCHITECTURE]

1. Identify the provider and the bill's currency. Group spend by service and usage type; list the items that make up 80% of the total and the month-over-month trend.
2. Look for savings in four groups:

• Waste: unattached volumes and IPs, old snapshots and images, idle load balancers, non-production environments running all week, unused provisioned capacity.
• Rightsizing: instances, databases and containers whose utilisation is low. Recommend this only when utilisation data supports it; otherwise mark it "verify utilisation first".
• Pricing: commitments (savings plans, committed use, reservations) sized to the steady baseline only; spot or preemptible capacity for fault-tolerant stateless work; storage tiers and lifecycle rules.
• Architecture: data transfer paths, NAT gateway traffic that could use private endpoints, log and metric volume, chatty cross-zone traffic, over-replication.

1. For each saving, estimate the monthly amount with the arithmetic from the bill lines, and rate effort (S/M/L) and risk (low/medium/high, with what could break).
2. Rank by monthly saving adjusted for effort and risk. Separate reversible quick wins from commitments that lock in spend.

• Every number must come from the export or be marked as an estimate with its assumption. Do not invent usage figures.
• Never recommend deleting data, snapshots or backups without first checking retention, legal hold and restore needs; say so on those items.
• Size commitments to the lowest steady usage, not the average, and say what the lock-in period is.
• Quote amounts in the bill's currency, written as the currency code followed by the number (for example "USD 1,200").
• Separate what you verified from what you inferred. Mark inferences as such.
• When you do not know, say "I don't know" once and state what would settle it.

Spend summary

Total, trend, and a table of the top cost lines with their share.

Ranked savings

A table: rank, change, monthly saving, effort, risk, reversible (yes/no).

Details

One short subsection per saving: evidence from the bill, the exact action, what could break, how to verify the saving next month.

Do not touch

Items that look wasteful but are not, and why.

Data needed

What extra data (utilisation, tags, traffic) would sharpen the estimates.