Cloud costs in 2022: why the bill grew without new projects
How currency swings and provider pricing changes shifted the economics of cloud for companies in 2022.
In early 2022 several of my clients faced the same situation: their cloud infrastructure bill grew by 50-100% in local currency terms without any change in the volume of resources consumed. No new projects, no configuration mistakes - just a currency shift and a change in some providers' pricing policies.
This is a good occasion to talk about cloud economics in general - what goes into them and what can be done about it.
What cloud costs consist of
A cloud bill is not one number. It is a combination of different line items, each of which can grow independently.
Compute - instances, containers, functions. Storage - object, block, archive. Traffic - inbound, outbound, cross-region. Managed services - databases, queues, monitoring. Support and licences.
In most companies these items are not explicitly separated. The cloud bill arrives as one line and is treated as a constant - until it grows. At that point it turns out that no one understands in detail what is actually consuming the budget.
Why cloud costs often escape control
The first reason is growth by default. Teams create new resources but rarely delete old ones. Test environments stay running. Backups are kept longer than needed. Instances run at excess capacity because "we might need it".
The second reason is visibility only at the level of the total bill. Without detailed cost allocation by project, team, or service, it is impossible to see where money is being spent inefficiently.
The third reason is architectural decisions made without considering cost. A microservices architecture with heavy internal traffic, a suboptimal choice of storage classes, unnecessary redundancy - all of this creates hidden costs that surface when things scale or when prices change.
What to do during a period of price increases
When prices are rising for external reasons, there are a few parallel workstreams.
Audit current spending. Get a breakdown of the bill by line item and by project. Find unused or excess resources - this typically yields 10-30% savings without any architectural changes.
Review storage architecture. Data that is rarely accessed should live in cheaper storage classes. This is a simple change that is often not made.
Evaluate alternatives. If one provider has become more expensive or unavailable, what are the options - another international provider, a local cloud, a hybrid approach? This requires analysis, not an immediate decision.
Restructure contracts. Many providers offer discounts for committing to resource reservations over time. If consumption is predictable, this can deliver meaningful savings.
Questions to ask
- Do you know what share of your cloud bill is attributable to each project or product?
- When was the last audit of unused resources?
- Do you have a dedicated cloud budget with month-by-month variance monitoring?
- If your primary cloud provider became unavailable or doubled its prices, do you have a plan?
Managing cloud costs is not a one-time task. It is an operational discipline that requires regular attention.