How do you reduce cloud costs in a DevOps environment?
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Quick Answer
Right-size resources, auto-scale (including scale-to-zero), use spot/reserved/savings-plan pricing for suitable workloads, clean up idle/orphaned resources, and monitor spend with tagging and budgets (FinOps).
Detailed Answer
FinOps makes cost a shared engineering concern: continuous right-sizing from utilization data, spot instances for fault-tolerant workloads, reservations/savings plans for steady baseline, storage lifecycle policies, and killing zombie resources. Cost visibility via tagging, dashboards, and anomaly alerts is what makes optimization sustainable rather than one-off.
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Interview Tip
Frame it as FinOps: pair pricing/right-sizing tactics with cost visibility (tagging, budgets) so savings stick.
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