How do you approach cloud cost optimisation?

Summary

Start with visibility (tags, cost per team, budgets, anomaly detection), remove waste (idle and unattached resources, old snapshots, logs kept forever), rightsize from metrics, then commit (savings plans/reservations) for the stable baseline, use spot for interruptible work, and address architecture (data transfer paths, storage tiers, Arm instances, serverless for spiky loads).

Longer Answer

FinOps is shared: engineers see what their services cost. Order matters: commit after rightsizing, or you lock in waste.

Key Points

• Visibility first.
• Remove waste, then rightsize.
• Commit to the baseline; spot for batch.
• Fix architecture-level costs.

Deep dive: Cloud Engineering in Production: The Resources Nobody Owned

What interviewers look for

A sequenced, measurable approach.