#19. How Simple “Free” Automation Can Save you Significant Cloud Cost?

How can you prevent cost and optimize them without efforts for free?

You may already have a tool that provides insights on cloud costs and optimization recommendations. However, I believe such tools often miss the core issue. While it's easy to gather data and information today, getting people to act on it is the real challenge. Consider climate change—we have abundant scientific data, yet establishing accountability and motivating action remains difficult. So how can we encourage engineers to implement cost-saving optimizations and establish preventive governance measures? The answer is Automation.

Here's a bonus: You don't need expensive tools to automate workflows. This article will show you some open-source solution examples that you can set up and extend to fit your needs with minimal time investment and at no extra cost—solutions that can help you save significantly on cloud costs. **

Suggesting Improved Costs: Shifting Left Automations

Engineers typically resist additional external workloads, even when they promise significant cost reductions. They don't appreciate Slack messages interrupting their development work to request EC2 instance changes. I know this firsthand—I'm an engineer.

So how do automations help engineers to save costs?

Using a platform like infracost, which is mostly free, enables engineers to see resource costs before deployment. This cost awareness during the design phase, known as shifting left, not only saves money but also encourages engineers to take ownership of their costs. Rather than dealing with disruptive optimization requests later, they can make informed decisions upfront. The starting cost? $0.

Preventing Costs: Governance of Cloud and Remediation

Many companies spend a fortune on tools that automate actions like rightsizing or scheduling VM shutdowns. But did you know there are excellent open-source alternatives that do this for free?

Consider Cloud Custodian and Guardrails, which help you set declarative guardrails (governance) to prevent cloud waste. These tools can also automatically remediate issues when policy breaches occur.

The way these tools work is simple:

Set a policy → example: Block New Resources In Non-Standard Regions
Set filters → Which regions are allowed, and which aren't
Set actions → Notify users, terminate resources automatically, or combine multiple actions

These tools remediate issues automatically without requiring developer intervention. This allows you to enforce governance proactively rather than reactively optimizing resources.

The cost: remain 0$.

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Finding Cloud Cost Savings: Optimizing Costs

What if you're still looking for opportunities to optimize cloud usage? Can we do this for free?

Consider SteamPipe and turbo pipes, open-source tools that convert your cloud resources into a searchable database inventory. Their motto is select * from cloud; —a perfect illustration of how easily you can now gain full visibility into your usage.

Here's a practical example of how useful this can be. Let's say you want to find all unused storage volumes. You can simply type

select volume_id, volume_type from aws_ebs_volume where attachments is null;

Once you've identified these optimization opportunities, you can use automation workflows like flowpipe to handle them automatically without requiring engineer intervention.

Best of all, the cost stays at $0, and engineers need to invest minimal effort.

Summary.

The more you automate, the better results you'll achieve in cost prevention, governance, and optimization. You don't need to break the bank to implement automation—open-source or freemium tools can do the job effectively. Tools like Infracost, Cloud Custodian, and the Turbot family (steampipe, turbobots, guardrails and flowpipe) can be invaluable assets.