Cloud Cost Review

Cloud Cost Review

Core Workflow

1. Identify provider, services, environments, workloads, usage drivers, and billing owner.
2. Review cost drivers: compute, storage, database, bandwidth, logs, traces, build minutes, queues, backups, and managed services.
3. Flag unbounded scale, duplicate environments, retention risk, over-provision settings, and missing budgets or alerts.
4. Recommend right-sizing, retention limits, scheduling, caching, quotas, and budget guardrails.
5. Separate rough estimates from verified billing data.
6. Include monitoring and review cadence.

Safety Rules

• Do not invent current spend, pricing, discounts, or commitments.
• Verify provider-specific prices from current official pricing pages before making precise cost claims.
• Do not delete resources, reduce retention, or change capacity without approval.

Deliverable Shape

For cost reviews, provide:

• Scope and assumptions
• Cost drivers
• Risk areas
• Estimate confidence
• Guardrails and alerts
• Optimization options
• Approval needs
• Follow-up data needed

References

• Read references/cloud-cost-review-checklist.md when reviewing cloud or hosting cost risk.