Five cloud cost lessons from a year of client migrations

Every cloud migration we audit tells the same story: infrastructure that made sense at launch, quietly accumulating cost as the product evolved around it. Here are the five patterns we encounter most.

One: oversized instances 'to be safe.' Right-sizing based on actual utilization data is usually the single biggest win — we routinely find compute running at 15% utilization. Two: forgotten environments. Staging clusters running 24/7 for products deployed twice a month. Scheduled shutdown scripts pay for themselves in days.

Three: unoptimized storage tiers. Logs and backups sitting in hot storage for years. Four: missing reserved capacity. Teams paying on-demand prices for workloads that haven't changed shape in a year. Five: data transfer surprises — the line item nobody models until it's a third of the bill.

The meta-lesson: cloud cost is a practice, not a project. A monthly hour of review with proper tagging in place catches drift before it compounds.