Cloud Cost Quick Wins for Year-End

Global cloud spend hits $720 billion in 2025—and organizations waste 20-30% on unused resources. Year-end is the perfect time to show savings before budgets reset.

In this episode, Jordan and Alex deliver six actionable quick wins you can implement THIS WEEK to demonstrate immediate cloud cost savings.

📋 CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Introduction & News Segment
01:30 - The $720B Problem: Cloud Waste at Scale
02:45 - Quick Win #1: Scheduling (70% savings)
04:00 - Quick Win #2: Right-Sizing (25-40% per instance)
05:15 - Quick Win #3: Commitment Play (up to 72% discount)
06:30 - Quick Win #4: Spot Instances (60-90% savings)
07:45 - Quick Win #5: Storage Tiering
08:45 - Quick Win #6: Zombie Hunt
09:45 - Cross-Team Coordination
10:30 - Leadership Pitch Framework
11:15 - Monday Morning Checklist
12:00 - Closing

💰 THE SIX QUICK WINS:
1. Scheduling non-prod environments → 70% savings
2. Right-sizing oversized instances → 25-40% per instance
3. Reserved Instances/Savings Plans → Up to 72% discount
4. Spot instances for CI/CD → 60-90% savings
5. Storage tiering → Move cold data to Glacier
6. Zombie resource hunt → $500-2K/month per account

📰 NEWS SEGMENT (December 4, 2025):
• Envoy v1.36.3: Three CVEs including request smuggling - PATCH NOW
• Loki Operator 0.9.0: Automatic NetworkPolicy deployment
• AWS Graviton5 M9g: 25-35% performance improvements (preview)
• Uncloud: Deploy containers without Kubernetes complexity

📚 RESOURCES:
• Full transcript: https://platformengineering.org/podca...
• Platform Engineering Playbook: https://platformengineering.org

🔗 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
• AWS Instance Scheduler
• Azure Automation
• AWS Cost Explorer / Azure Advisor / GCP Recommender
• S3 Glacier / Azure Archive / GCP Coldline
• FinOps Foundation

#PlatformEngineering #FinOps #CloudCosts #DevOps #Kubernetes #AWS #Azure #GCP #CloudOptimization #TechPodcast