Cloud Optimization is process of analysing the cloud infrastructure to reduce the budget so that You don't end up paying un-necessary for the resources for example identify un-wanted resources, eliminating waste, right sizing for workload, and using automation to scale down resources when they are not needed anymore.

Most of the Cloud computing Servers can go un-used if you do not perform audit regularly. Auditing the cloud resources can save a lots of costs in Cloud Computing. Similarly, Implementing proactive Monitoring tools and getting daily/weekly reports of Infrastructure usage and erros can help to forsee the future growth of your cloud infrastructure.

Sometimes Companies think that they should use Multi-Cloud to prevent vendor lockdown, however if you spend 100k in AWS and 100K in Azure and 100K in Google Cloud then if you take all services from one cloud then total cost is 300K, at that cost may be single cloud can provide a lots of discounts being a big customer account which can save a lot of costs for you.

It happens quite often that when there is slowness, Developers simple check CPU amd Memory and scale up in case values are high, which resolves the issues for them, however 80% times the issue is due to bad design of Application code or database SQL Query plan which can eat up all resources, if you give 2-3 hours in refining code, you can save a lot of your costs and prevent un-necessary scaleups.

Automation can do wonders if desgined smartly. Like in AWS, you can configure automatic scaleup and scale down using cloud config (available in other cloud providers as well), scaling down resources at night time when traffic is low can save 1000s per Month.

Use of DevOps automation, tools like CI/CD tools can save lot of time for your deployment team, similarly tools like Terraform and Ansible can automate your workloads and task of two Cloud Engineers can be accomplished by only one Cloud engineer, which in turn reduces manpower.