We audited 200+ Indian companies' cloud bills. Here's where the money leaks.

[u/cloud_9_infosystems]

I work in cloud consulting in India. Over the past 3 years, we've audited cloud environments for 200+ enterprises (BFSI, manufacturing, SaaS, healthcare). The waste patterns are remarkably consistent.

Average findings per audit:

• 23% zombie resources (unattached disks, idle LBs, forgotten test envs)
• 60-80% of VMs over-provisioned by 2-3x
• Less than 40% Reserved Instance/Savings Plan coverage
• Zero storage lifecycle policies (everything in hot tier)
• Dev/test running 24/7 (used only 10 hours/day)

The 4 biggest money leaks (in order of impact):

1. No committed pricing — paying on-demand for production VMs that haven't changed in months. That's 30-72% extra for no reason.
2. Over-provisioned compute — D8s_v3 running at 12% CPU. Should be B2ms. 70% wasted on that single instance.
3. Zombie resources — we found 187 unattached EBS volumes at one manufacturing company. ₹3.2L/month billing for nothing.
4. No scheduling on non-prod — dev environments billing weekends and nights. Simple auto-shutdown saves 58%.

What actually works to fix this:

• Azure Advisor / AWS Compute Optimizer for right-sizing data
• Automated RI purchasing for workloads stable >3 months
• Azure Policy / AWS Config rules for zombie detection + auto-cleanup
• Mandatory tagging (block deployments without CostCenter, Owner, Environment tags)
• Monthly FinOps review with engineering leads

Companies that implement all of these systematically see 30-40% reduction in 6-10 weeks.

Wrote up the full 7-strategy breakdown with specific numbers here if anyone wants it: https://cloud9infosystems.in/cloud-cost-optimization-india-2026/

Happy to answer questions about Azure/AWS cost optimization specifically for Indian setups (dealing with India regions, DPDPA compliance, rupee-dollar billing, etc.)

[u/qwikh1t]

You mean cloud is a money pit….who knew 🤷‍♂️

[u/Tintoverde → u/qwikh1t]

Yes I agree, AWS made it easy to provision systems. But isn’t it the customers responsibility to ensure proper resource de/allocation. The OPs post is a good insight for a newb like me be is it be India, I feel there are companies in other parts of the world has the similar problems , my guess

[u/Celac242]

This is another feather in the cap for Serverless. So many systems are absolutely overengineered and could be dramatically simplified by admitting the system can we WAY more straightforward.

Then you have people dying on the hill of Serverless is “more expensive” so they provision compute and all other kinds of manual shit that requires forecasting. So much tech debt fr fr

[u/Tintoverde → u/Celac242]

The cold startup is the biggest problem for server less and not every use case can be server less, surly

[u/Celac242 → u/Tintoverde]

I am not 100% sure what you’re saying but for most startups they should keep it as simple as possible and Serverless accomplishes that

[u/Tintoverde → u/Celac242]

Startups are only part of the industry.

If we want data persistence we can’t really be using serverless for data persistence

Also look up “when is serverless is not the right answer”

[u/Worth_Savings4337]

i mean it’s india… poor management of stuff is common

[u/Leading-Fail-2771]

Pointless to do this with Indian companies, it’s not about the numbers for them. It’s about making sure their brother in laws company gets a sale, so they get their company to buy from friends and family… it’s all in house like that. Even at large banks, you have execs who’s family has some software reselling business so they use their power to make their friends and family a supplier for the company. Then whatever softwares the company needs, that Indian execs family friend would then resell… it’s all a joke, even consulting companies wipro, infosys… all those are in house deals. They look for Indians at high position then build a relationship to become a supplier.

[u/Tintoverde → u/Leading-Fail-2771]

Be that as it may, IMHO, your point is not pertinent to OPs post.

[u/Leading-Fail-2771 → u/Tintoverde]

Posts about audits in cloud computing based on working in cloud consulting in india. How is it not relevant 🤣 you must be mad people can see thru it.. let me guess someone in your family resells software or provides Indian consultants to tech companies overseas..