Cost Optimizer

Overview

Cloud bills have a way of growing faster than revenue. Cost Optimizer provides the visibility and recommendations you need to keep cloud spending efficient without sacrificing performance or reliability.

The skill connects to your cloud accounts (read-only), analyzes resource utilization, billing data, and usage patterns, then generates specific recommendations with estimated savings. It distinguishes between quick wins (unused resources, oversized instances) and strategic optimizations (reserved instances, architectural changes).

Unlike simple cost dashboards, it uses AI to understand your workload patterns and make contextual recommendations. An instance that’s idle at night might be a candidate for scheduling, while one that’s consistently at 10% CPU needs right-sizing.

How It Works

1. Connect — Read-only access to cloud billing and resource APIs
2. Analyze — Evaluate resource utilization, spending patterns, and waste
3. Recommend — Generate prioritized optimization recommendations
4. Estimate — Calculate potential savings for each recommendation
5. Track — Monitor savings after implementing recommendations

Use Cases

• Monthly cost review — Automated analysis of cloud spending trends
• Right-sizing — Identify over-provisioned compute, database, and storage resources
• Waste elimination — Find and remove unused resources (unattached volumes, idle load balancers)
• Reservation planning — Recommend reserved instance purchases based on usage patterns
• Budget alerts — Early warning for spending anomalies and budget overruns

Getting Started

# Analyze AWS account
cost-optimize --provider aws --profile production

# Multi-cloud analysis
cost-optimize --providers aws,azure,gcp --output report.html

# Focus on quick wins
cost-optimize --provider aws --min-savings 100 --max-effort low

Example

Cloud Cost Analysis: AWS Production Account
Period: March 2026 | Total Spend: $47,230

💰 Optimization Opportunities:

Quick Wins (implement today, save $4,200/mo):
1. 🗑️ 12 unattached EBS volumes — $380/mo
2. 📉 3 idle RDS instances (0 connections) — $890/mo
3. 📦 S3 lifecycle policies for 40TB old logs — $620/mo
4. 🔄 Right-size 8 EC2 instances (avg 12% CPU) — $2,310/mo

Strategic (1-2 weeks, save $8,400/mo):
5. 💳 Reserved Instances for 15 stable workloads — $6,200/mo
6. 🏗️ Spot instances for batch processing — $2,200/mo

Total Potential Savings: $12,600/mo (26.7% of spend)
Annual Savings: $151,200

Alternatives

• AWS Cost Explorer — Native AWS cost analysis tool
• Infracost — Cloud cost estimates for infrastructure-as-code
• Kubecost — Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization