The Cost Optimization Hierarchy#

Cloud cost optimization follows a hierarchy of impact. Work from the top down – fixing the wrong tier of commitment discount matters far less than shutting down resources nobody uses.

1. Eliminate waste – turn off unused resources, delete orphaned storage
2. Right-size – match instance sizes to actual usage
3. Use commitment discounts – reserved instances, savings plans, CUDs
4. Shift to spot/preemptible – for fault-tolerant workloads
5. Optimize storage and network – tiering, transfer patterns, caching
6. Architect for cost – serverless, auto-scaling, multi-region strategy

Eliminating Waste#

The fastest cost reduction comes from finding resources that serve no purpose. Every cloud provider accumulates these: instances left running after a test, snapshots from decommissioned servers, load balancers with no backends, unattached disks.

Terraform Code Quality#

Writing Terraform that works is easy. Writing Terraform that is safe, maintainable, and comprehensible to the next person (or agent) is harder. Most quality problems are not bugs — they are patterns that work today but create pain tomorrow: hardcoded IDs that break in a new account, missing lifecycle rules that cause accidental data loss, modules that are too big to understand or too small to justify their existence.