Cloud Cost Optimization checklist | Turbo360

As businesses continue to expand their presence in the cloud, the necessity for smarter, more strategic cost management has never been more pronounced. While Azure offers remarkable agility and flexibility, it can also become an unexpected expense if not monitored carefully. As we progress through 2025, optimising cloud spending isn’t merely a financial concern; it’s a shared responsibility that involves DevOps, developers, engineering managers, and business leaders alike.

Our internal analyses from customer discussions reveal that approximately 30% of cloud expenditure is wasted due to unused resources, inadequate visibility, and over-provisioning. The positive aspect? Much of this waste is preventable. By utilising a practical checklist and the right tools, you can significantly reduce cloud costs without hindering your delivery or innovation pace.

Ensure Accountability from the Start

An often-overlooked aspect of managing cloud costs is ownership. If there’s no one accountable for the bill, there’s little incentive to control costs. It’s essential to assign ownership for each resource group’s costs.

Implement tagging conventions such as owner:devteam-a or env:prod to facilitate data analysis. To avoid disputes during billing discussions, establish a proper showback or chargeback model. Turbo360 aids teams in creating this accountability structure by providing visibility into cost data by team, application, or region. For more insights, explore our article on Cost Governance in Azure.

Refine Your Tagging Strategy

You’ve probably heard this before, but it bears repeating: without effective tagging, tracking is impossible. If your Azure resources lack proper tags, you’re navigating blind when assessing costs.

Tags should encompass fundamental aspects such as environment, owner, project, and team. The challenge lies in maintaining consistency. While you can enforce tagging at the time of creation with Azure policies, human forgetfulness is common. Turbo360 allows you to automatically audit and rectify tagging gaps, ensuring your cost reports remain actionable. Check out our Tagging Best Practices in Azure to streamline your tagging system.

Eliminate Unused Resources

You might be astonished by the amount of unnecessary clutter lurking in your cloud account—old test VMs, unattached disks, expired public IPs, and forgotten backups all accumulate charges each month.

Idle resources present a significant opportunity for savings. Turbo360’s Idle Resource Cleanup module enables you to swiftly identify and remove these resources. Even minor cleanup efforts every few weeks can substantially impact your overall expenses. Bonus tip: Implement auto-shutdowns for non-production environments; there’s no need for them to run overnight or throughout weekends.

Right-Size Your Resources

Just because you have access to powerful D-series VMs or high-tier databases doesn’t mean you should use them. Numerous teams over-provision out of caution, leading to unnecessary expenditures for unused capacity.

Utilise Azure Monitor or Turbo360’s cost-to-performance analysis to pinpoint underutilised resources. If your VM is operating at just 8% CPU usage for an entire month, you’re overpaying. Consider switching to burstable SKUs or smaller sizes. Ideally, employ auto-scaling for workloads with fluctuating demand.

Secure Discounts Where Possible

Running services around the clock? Production databases or backend APIs? These are prime candidates for Reserved Instances or Azure Savings Plans, potentially saving you up to 60% by committing to one- or three-year terms.

Start small by analysing your usage patterns; perhaps begin with a few one-year reservations before expanding. Turbo360 can simulate potential savings to make your decision easier and more confident.

Automate Routine Tasks

Development and testing environments are notorious for being left on outside of working hours, akin to leaving lights on after leaving the office.

Schedule these environments to shut down when not in use. While Azure Automation can help, Turbo360 offers more precise control, including calendar-based schedules and team-level overrides. A daily 12-hour shutdown could reduce your non-production costs by nearly half.

Consider Serverless or PaaS Options

If your workload doesn’t necessitate a virtual machine, skip it. Serverless functions, Logic Apps, and Azure App Service can greatly lower infrastructure costs and alleviate operational burdens.

Have nightly batch jobs? Move them to Azure Functions. Hosting light web applications? Explore the Azure App Service or Azure Container Apps. These services auto-scale, charge based on execution or runtime, and minimise the need for constant oversight. For instance, Turbo360 recently assisted a client in reducing Azure Function costs by 45% by optimising monitoring of cold starts and execution patterns.

Streamline and Optimize Storage

Storage costs can unexpectedly escalate over time with old logs, outdated snapshots, and forgotten blob containers accumulating quickly.

Conduct regular audits of your storage. Remove unnecessary items, transfer archives to cheaper tiers such as Cool or Archive, and automate lifecycle policies. Many teams underestimate the savings of relocating cold data from hot storage tiers.

Keep an Eye on Network and Egress Costs

Expenses from cross-region data transfers, CDN utilisation, and ExpressRoute traffic can fly under the radar. As your application scales, these costs can rapidly increase.

Whenever possible, maintain resource allocation within the same region to avoid unnecessary egress charges. Set up private endpoints and ensure proper caching configuration in your CDN. Small adjustments can significantly impact costs when transferring large volumes of data monthly.

Create Cost Dashboards and Alerts

You can’t address issues you can’t identify. Instead of waiting until the end of the month to review bills, establish dashboards and real-time alerts for any cost anomalies.

Azure Cost Management provides basic dashboards, but Turbo360 offers deeper insights, allowing detailed breakdowns by subscription, environment, team, or application. Track budgets, receive alerts for usage surges, and identify untagged resources that suddenly appear.

Foster a FinOps Culture

Cost optimisation isn’t solely the responsibility of finance or DevOps anymore; it’s a collaborative effort across all functions. FinOps integrates financial accountability into engineering processes.

Conduct cost workshops, share usage data with development teams, and incorporate cloud spending into your retrospectives. Showback reports are an effective way to bring this information to light without coming across as punitive. When teams understand how their decisions affect expenditures, they’re more likely to make informed choices.

Why Choose Turbo360?

While native tools are adequate for getting started, expanding teams often require more comprehensive and centralised solutions. Turbo360 bridges these gaps with intelligent recommendations, automation, and enhanced visibility, specifically designed for Azure.

From proactive idle resource detection to sophisticated scheduling options, Turbo360 ensures your cloud expenditure remains efficient and aligned with your business objectives.

Conclusion

Ultimately, cloud cost optimisation is not a one-time task—it’s an ongoing journey. It involves cultivating good habits, adopting tools that minimise manual work, and ensuring that every stakeholder is engaged.

From rightsizing and automation to assignment of accountability, even minor adjustments can yield significant dividends over time. Use this checklist as a guiding principle, and rely on Turbo360 to help embed these improvements. A leaner cloud environment means your team can operate more efficiently, and your CFO will sleep much easier at night.