The checklist I run on every cloud account

Every account I review, I go through the same checklist

Not because I need the checklist. Because the checklist makes sure I don't skip things when I'm moving fast or when something interesting distracts me early

Here it is

Billing and visibility
Are budget alerts configured at meaningful thresholds?
Is billing export set up for deep analysis?
What percentage of resources have cost allocation tags?
What is the tag coverage gap and what does it make invisible?

Compute
What is the average CPU utilization across EC2 or Compute Engine instances over the last 30 days?
What is the average memory utilization?
Are there instances with consistent utilization under 20 percent?
Are there instances that could run on spot or preemptible capacity?
Is autoscaling configured where the workload allows it?

Storage
What storage class is the majority of object storage using?
When were the objects last accessed?
Are there snapshots or backups older than the recovery requirement?
Are there volumes or disks not attached to any compute resource?

Databases
What is the RDS or Cloud SQL utilization compared to provisioned capacity?
Are automated backup retention policies aligned with actual recovery requirements?
Are read replicas being used and is their utilization justified?

Networking
What is the data transfer cost broken down by type?
Is there traffic crossing regional or AZ boundaries that doesn't need to?
Are there NAT gateways or load balancers with no traffic?

Forgotten resources
Are there resources in regions not being actively used?
Are there services that were provisioned for testing and never decommissioned?
Are there reserved instances that expired and weren't renewed?

Spending commitments
What percentage of steady-state compute is covered by savings plans or reserved instances?
Are the commitments sized based on rightsized utilization or on historical on-demand usage?

This list is not complete. Every account adds something new

But accounts that are clean on this list are accounts that have their costs under control