Cloud Cost Optimization: AWS vs Azure vs GCP (2025 Comparison)

Oct 26, 2025•

cloudfinopsawsazure

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Optimizing cloud cost is an engineering practice: design for efficiency, measure unit economics, and automate guardrails. This guide compares AWS, Azure, and GCP levers by category with actionable steps.

Executive summary

Tag everything; attribute costs; set budgets/alerts early
Rightsize compute; autoscale; use spot/preemptible where safe
Optimize storage classes and lifecycle policies
Reduce egress with caches/CDNs and data locality
Commit (SP/RI/CUD) after baselining; avoid lock-in pitfalls

Compute

AWS: Savings Plans/Reserved Instances; Spot; Graviton (arm64)
Azure: Reserved VM Instances; Spot; Ampere (arm64)
GCP: Committed Use Discounts; Spot VMs; Tau/Ampere

Patterns: scale-to-zero, scheduled shutdowns, vertical/Horizontal mix, autoscaling thresholds, bin-packing for containers.

Storage

Tiering: S3/Blob/GCS → infrequent → archive
Lifecycle policies; intelligent-tiering; object lock where needed
Compression and formats: Parquet/ORC for analytics

Networking

Egress controls: CDNs, caches, same-region access, private links
Peering vs transit costs; NAT gateway alternatives; QUIC/HTTP3

Databases

Provisioned vs serverless; scale read replicas; query tuning
Backups lifecycle and PITR costs; storage engine choices

Managed services

Queue/stream retention; shard and retention policies
Function cold starts; concurrency limits; async patterns

FinOps workflows

Tagging and cost allocation by product/team/environment
Budgets, alerts, anomaly detection; weekly cost reviews
Unit economics: cost per request, build, user, tenant

Tooling

Native: Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Cost
Third-party: Kubecost, CloudZero, ProsperOps

Checklists

Compute rightsizing; spot coverage; commits coverage
Storage lifecycle and classes; analytics formats
Egress minimization; CDN/cache hit rates
DB indexes and query efficiency; backup policies

FAQ

When to commit?
After 2–4 weeks of baseline; start small; increase coverage gradually.

Arm64 migration worth it?
Often 20–40% savings; validate perf; test critical libs.

Appendix A — Savings plan strategies

Coverage targets by environment; renewal cadences; multi-year vs 1-year
Risk management for over-commit; diversification by family/region

Appendix B — Top‑Up Index (1–300)

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