Cloud & DevOps·December 18, 2025·4 min read

A Practical Cloud Cost Audit Checklist

By Nexbytte Team

Before touching architecture, we run a straightforward checklist: unused or oversized compute instances, storage tiers that were never downgraded after usage patterns changed, redundant environments left running after a project wrapped, egress costs from cross-region traffic that could be avoided, and reserved or committed-use pricing you qualify for but never enabled.

In our experience, this checklist alone typically finds 20–30% in recoverable cloud spend before any redesign work starts — because most cost problems are configuration drift, not bad architecture.

Once the easy wins are captured, the bigger architectural questions — right-sizing databases, caching strategy, and whether you actually need multi-region redundancy — are worth tackling with a clearer, cheaper baseline to compare against.