Cloud costs — how to optimise

Rightsizing

This section frames the topic "Rightsizing" in the context of Cloud costs — how to optimise. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

Reserved Instances

This section frames the topic "Reserved Instances" in the context of Cloud costs — how to optimise. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

Autoscaling

This section frames the topic "Autoscaling" in the context of Cloud costs — how to optimise. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

Tagging

This section frames the topic "Tagging" in the context of Cloud costs — how to optimise. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

Cost monitoring

A conversation about cloud costs starts with a single question: what exactly are we buying?. In practice there are three types of billing: flat fee, hourly, and mixed (base + overage). Each makes sense in a different scenario.

• Flat fee — a predictable cost, best for companies with a stable number of users and systems.
• Hourly — flexible, but hard to budget for a whole year.
• Mixed — the base covers 80% of the work, overage is billed separately; the most common model in SMEs.

What to watch for in a quote

The rate alone is not everything. Check what exactly the price covers, what the hour cap is, how out-of-scope projects are priced and whether travel is billed. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive offer in Poland can be 3–4× — and it usually comes down to what is "in the price" and what is not.