Cloud Cost Optimisation

Cut cloud bills up to ~90% — cost-driven architecture patterns and alternative providers.

Overview

Most companies overspend on cloud by 30–70% — and some by much more. This masterclass is a practical course on reducing cloud bills without sacrificing reliability or security. We cover cost-driven architecture patterns, alternative providers, self-hosting strategies, and the organisational changes needed to make cost awareness stick.

What you’ll learn

Where your cloud spend actually goes (and where it’s wasted)
Architecture patterns that cut costs at the design level
When to use AWS/GCP/Azure vs Hetzner, OVH, Fly.io, or bare metal
How to self-host critical services safely
Building a cost-aware engineering culture

Curriculum

Day 1 — Understanding & Auditing Cloud Costs

Cloud billing models: on-demand, reserved, spot, committed use
Cost audit workshop: analysing your current bill line by line
The 80/20 of cloud waste: oversized instances, idle resources, egress fees
Right-sizing compute: CPU, memory, and GPU profiling
Storage tiers and lifecycle policies
Hands-on: audit a real cloud bill and identify top savings opportunities

Day 2 — Cost-Driven Architecture

Architecture patterns that are inherently cheaper: edge computing, static generation, serverless-where-it-fits
Database cost optimisation: read replicas, connection pooling, query optimisation, managed vs self-hosted
CDN and caching strategies that slash egress costs
Alternative providers: Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, Fly.io — real benchmarks and migration stories
Self-hosting: what to bring in-house (databases, CI runners, monitoring) and what to leave managed
Hands-on: redesign an architecture for 50–80% cost reduction

Day 3 — Implementation & Culture

Migration strategies: gradual vs big-bang, hybrid setups
Terraform for multi-provider infrastructure
Monitoring and alerting on cost: Infracost, cloud-native budgets, custom dashboards
FinOps practices: cost ownership per team, showback/chargeback
Building cost awareness into engineering culture and review processes
Workshop: build a cost reduction roadmap for your organisation

Prerequisites

Experience running workloads on at least one major cloud provider
Basic understanding of networking and compute concepts

Outcomes

Your team leaves with a concrete cost reduction roadmap, alternative provider evaluations specific to your workloads, and the practices to keep costs under control long-term.