No one sets out to waste money in the cloud. It just… happens.
A few extra CPUs "just in case." A staging environment that never scaled down. A load balancer sized for traffic that never came.
At first, these feel like safe decisions. They give teams peace of mind, headroom, and buffer space. But multiply that logic across every team, account, and region—and you've got a cost balloon that no one owns.
This is over-provisioning. And if you're not tracking it, it's bleeding your cloud budget dry.
The Real Issue? You Don't Realize It's Happening
Over-provisioned resources don't trigger alarms. They don't throw errors or break builds. They just sit there, being too much—silently draining thousands every month.
The Silent Drain:
And by the time finance notices the spike, it's already too late.
Most DevOps and architecture teams rely on a patchwork of scripts, delayed usage reports, or guesswork to detect this kind of waste. But when you're running at scale, reactive cleanup isn't enough.
You need a process that prevents the waste before it gets comfortable.
So What Does That Process Actually Look Like?
At Cloudshot, we work with teams dealing with this every day. And here's what's working:
Weekly visibility into resource allocation vs actual usage
Don't wait until billing day to find inefficiencies. Cloudshot gives teams a live look at how much compute/storage they're using vs how much they requested—so you can right-size earlier.
Automatic detection of over-provisioned infrastructure—before the invoice hits
Cloudshot continuously scans your environments and flags instances, clusters, and services that are oversized or underutilized—helping you fix them while they're still running.
Dashboards that don't just show costs, but why they're bloated
Anyone can show a number. But Cloudshot tells you what's causing it—unattached volumes, idle services, outdated test environments, or inefficient deployment patterns—so you can act decisively.
Tagging that actually reflects ownership—so someone fixes it
With clear, enforced tagging standards and role-based dashboards, Cloudshot makes sure every resource is traceable to a team or owner. No ambiguity. No finger-pointing. Just accountability.
Customer Success Story
One of our customers called it their "cloud clarity moment." They thought their infra was lean—until Cloudshot revealed:
- 9 oversized EC2s running for 6+ months
- 3 QA environments using production-grade instances
- $17K/month in unnecessary spend—completely invisible to their existing tools
Within a week, they had it all cleaned up.
That's the power of seeing what you're actually running—not just what you planned to run.
Over-provisioning is one of the most common, least obvious forms of cloud waste. But it's also one of the easiest to fix—once you have the right lens.
That's why we built Cloudshot: So DevOps teams and architects can catch this waste before it becomes an expense line item.
Stop Guessing What's Bloated. Start Seeing It.
Start your free trial of Cloudshot and take control of your cloud footprint.