Our monthly cloud billing has skyrocketed after moving to a multi-cloud setup with GCP and AWS. We are struggling with visibility across different dashboards. What are the most effective FinOps strategies or third-party tools to identify orphaned resources and right-size our instances effectively?
3 answers
Managing costs in a multi-cloud environment requires a cultural shift toward FinOps. First, you must implement a tagging policy that is consistent across both AWS and GCP; without this, visibility is impossible. We used a central dashboard to track "unattached EBS volumes" and "idle Load Balancers." By shifting to Spot Instances for non-production workloads, we slashed our monthly bill by nearly 30%. I recommend looking at tools like CloudHealth or Kubecost if you are running heavy Kubernetes clusters, as they provide granular views into container-level spending that native tools miss.
Are you finding that the egress fees between AWS and GCP are the main culprit for the budget overruns, or is it mostly due to over-provisioned compute resources that aren't being used?
The best way to start is by setting up automated alerts for budget thresholds. If you hit 80% of your budget by the 15th of the month, you need to know immediately to adjust.
Jessica is right. Automation is key. We set up Lambda scripts to automatically shut down "Dev" environments after 6 PM on weekdays to save costs.
David, it is actually a mix of both. We realized we were moving massive datasets between clouds for analytics without realizing the cost of data transfer. To fix this, we started using localized processing to minimize egress. We also discovered that our dev teams were leaving high-performance GPU instances running over the weekends, which was a huge waste of our budget.