Ultimate Guide to Multi-Cloud Rightsizing

Struggling to control costs in your multi-cloud setup? You're not alone - 85% of organisations now use two or more cloud platforms, but managing resources across them can be complex and expensive. Multi-cloud rightsizing is the key to balancing performance and cost efficiency.

Key Takeaways:

• What is it? Rightsizing means optimising cloud resources to avoid over- or under-provisioning.
• Why it matters: Up to 30% of cloud spend is wasted, and effective rightsizing can cut costs by the same amount.
• Challenges: Managing costs, integration issues, skills gaps, and security across multiple platforms.
• Steps to get started:
  • Monitor resource usage regularly.
  • Remove unused or underutilised resources.
  • Automate cost controls and scaling.
  • Use provider-specific discounts like AWS Spot Instances or Azure Reservations.
  • Centralise management with multi-cloud tools.

By following these steps, organisations can reduce waste, improve performance, and align cloud usage with business goals. Start small, automate where possible, and make multi-cloud rightsizing an ongoing practice.

Azure Right Sizing and Scaling

Core Principles of Multi-Cloud Rightsizing

Multi-cloud rightsizing isn’t just about trimming expenses - it’s about creating a framework that supports your business goals while ensuring performance and flexibility. With 89% of organisations already relying on multiple cloud providers [2] and Gartner projecting that over 85% of businesses will prioritise a cloud-first approach by year-end [2], having clear principles in place is critical to managing the complexity of multi-cloud environments.

Once the challenges are identified, these core principles provide a structured way to optimise resources across multiple cloud platforms. Success hinges on three core principles that work together to create a sustainable approach to resource management.

Monitor and Assess Resources Regularly

Consistent monitoring is at the heart of effective multi-cloud rightsizing. Without a clear view of how resources are performing across providers, it’s impossible to make informed optimisation decisions.

Continuous monitoring involves tracking usage patterns, performance metrics, and cost data to ensure resources align with business objectives. This means deploying monitoring tools capable of identifying underutilised or overprovisioned instances, storage, and network resources. Automated systems can flag unusual spending patterns, track costs in real time, and send alerts when thresholds are breached [4]. Beyond technical metrics, aligning cloud usage with business goals ensures that resources aren’t just meeting performance targets but also advancing organisational priorities.

Balance Performance, Cost, and Growth

Finding the sweet spot between performance, cost, and growth is a complex but essential part of multi-cloud rightsizing. It requires provisioning resources to meet current needs while remaining flexible enough to accommodate future growth.

Take Airbnb, for example. By rightsizing instances and improving utilisation rates, they managed to achieve a 27% reduction in storage costs [3]. Meanwhile, JP Morgan Chase strategically leveraged AWS for analytics and Google Cloud for machine learning, enhancing fraud detection and risk assessment [3]. A Gartner study also found that businesses could cut operational costs by up to 25% through multi-cloud strategies coupled with effective cost management [3].

To support growth without compromising performance, organisations can adopt scalable instance types, set up auto-scaling policies, and reserve capacity for anticipated needs.

Integrate Rightsizing with Business Processes

Embedding rightsizing into existing business processes ensures optimisation efforts remain consistent, practical, and aligned with broader organisational goals. When cost management becomes part of daily operations, it transitions from being a standalone initiative to a core operational strategy.

For instance, embedding cost checks into CI/CD pipelines can help catch misconfigurations early, leading to more financially efficient deployments. In 2024, one software company tackled rising cloud costs by automating cost monitoring within their CI/CD processes, reducing their cloud spend by 30% without sacrificing performance [4].

FinOps practices encourage collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams, ensuring financial accountability in cloud operations. Governance frameworks, on the other hand, help enforce consistent policies across multi-cloud environments. These frameworks might include tagging resources for better tracking, implementing chargeback models to allocate costs accurately, and creating policies that align cloud usage with business objectives while adhering to compliance requirements [5][6].

Cultural integration is equally important. Regular training for DevOps teams, setting clear cost-saving targets, and recognising optimisation achievements can instil a cost-conscious mindset across the organisation. Automating policies - such as shutting down unused resources or scaling down overprovisioned instances - ensures that rightsizing practices are consistently applied across all cloud platforms.

Step-by-Step Guide to Multi-Cloud Rightsizing

Turn scattered data into actionable steps to reclaim up to 21% of wasted cloud spend [12], all while maintaining optimal performance.

This guide breaks down the rightsizing process into manageable steps, helping organisations translate monitoring data and business priorities into effective actions for multi-cloud optimisation.

Analyse Resource Usage

The first step in rightsizing is understanding how your resources are performing across different cloud providers. This involves collecting data from all environments to pinpoint inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.

Start by documenting each resource’s configuration - this includes its type, family, and purpose. A unified tagging system across all providers is essential for accurately linking costs to teams, projects, or applications [7][9].

To break down data silos, use unified observability platforms to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like CPU utilisation, memory usage, traffic, and uptime [7][8]. Centralise your data by gathering logs, metrics, traces, and events into one platform. Advanced tools with AI and machine learning capabilities can help detect patterns, identify anomalies, and even predict future resource needs [8].

By comparing resource configurations against performance benchmarks, you can categorise them as performing normally, overloaded, or underutilised [7]. With a clear picture in hand, you’re ready to tackle inefficiencies head-on.

Remove Waste and Optimise Resources

Once inefficiencies are identified, the next step is to eliminate waste and optimise resources for both cost and performance. With as much as 32% of cloud spending wasted due to underutilised or over-provisioned resources [13], this phase often delivers immediate savings.

• Eliminate idle resources: Remove unused virtual machines, unattached storage volumes, and orphaned network components, which are common culprits of waste [11]. In multi-cloud setups, up to 40% of resources may be underutilised, making this a critical area for cost-cutting [13].
• Right-size active resources: Use the data from your analysis to select instance types and sizes that match actual usage patterns. This ensures workloads have the capacity they need without overspending [11].
• Automate cost controls: Implement tools that detect anomalies, track spending, and generate reports. For example, Tenerity used Cloud Custodian on AWS Fargate to streamline weekly checks and monitor cloud waste via dashboards [10].
• Establish cost governance: Define policies to manage resource provisioning and avoid over- or under-provisioning. For predictable needs, consider reserved instances or savings plans, such as AWS EC2 Reserved Instances or Microsoft Azure Reservations, to secure discounts [11].

While these manual steps are effective, automation takes optimisation to the next level.

Automate Rightsizing Actions

Automation is key to maintaining ongoing optimisation as cloud environments expand. It reduces operational overhead and minimises human error.

Integrate optimisation tools into your existing development pipelines to ensure resource analysis happens during every build [14]. Automation tools, combined with machine learning, allow workloads to adjust dynamically based on predictive insights [14].

Use infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform to manage configurations, enforce budgets, and scale resources automatically [9][14]. Policy-driven automation ensures that resource utilisation is regularly reassessed and adjusted as needs evolve. For example, Delivery Hero’s IT team eliminated a bottleneck in their account recovery process - previously handling 800 monthly requests, each taking 35 minutes - through automation [15].

Start small by automating low-risk, high-impact tasks, such as shutting down unused development resources. Gradually expand to more complex scenarios as your team becomes more confident and experienced.

For tailored advice on refining your multi-cloud strategy, consult Hokstad Consulting, experts in optimising DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and hosting costs.

Advanced Multi-Cloud Rightsizing Strategies

Taking a step beyond basic rightsizing can unlock additional savings and performance improvements for organisations managing multi-cloud environments.

Use Provider-Specific Features

Cloud providers offer features tailored to help reduce costs significantly. For instance:

• AWS Spot Instances can cut costs by up to 90% compared to On-Demand pricing [17].
• Google Cloud Spot VMs offer savings of up to 91% by tapping into unused compute capacity [18].
• Azure Spot Virtual Machines provide similar savings of up to 90% by utilising surplus capacity [18].

Here’s a quick comparison of these features:

These options work well for tasks that can tolerate interruptions, such as batch jobs or development environments [17]. For more predictable workloads, reserved capacity or commitment discounts are better suited. For example, Azure Savings Plans can reduce compute costs by up to 65%, and the Azure Hybrid Benefit offers savings of up to 76% for migrating Windows Server or SQL Server workloads [18].

Hardware choices also affect costs. Azure, for instance, has a notable price difference between x86 and Arm CPUs - 65% for On-Demand and 69% for Spot instances [19]. Arm CPUs often deliver better value for compatible workloads, making them worth considering.

These provider-specific features lay the groundwork for centralised optimisation using modern tools.

Use Multi-Cloud Management Tools

Managing multiple cloud environments can be complex, but unified platforms simplify the process by offering centralised visibility and automation. According to the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of enterprises now use multi-cloud strategies to reduce risk and improve flexibility [20]. With Gartner predicting global cloud revenue to hit £578.7 billion by 2025 - a 21% year-on-year increase [20] - effective cost management becomes more crucial than ever.

Modern tools automate a variety of tasks, including backups, scaling, updates, and cost controls such as anomaly detection and forecasting [20]. While visibility is often fully automated, usage and rate optimisation usually require more manual input. However, advanced platforms can dynamically adjust commitments, blending discount models to maximise savings without human intervention [1].

Key automation features include:

• Real-time alerts for cost anomalies
• Autoscaling to match resource demands
• Automated discount management for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
• Enforcing tagging standards for cost tracking
• Scheduling instances to shut down during off-peak hours

The results can be substantial. For example, Drift used CloudZero to cut its annual AWS expenses by $2.4 million, illustrating the tangible impact of effective management tools [20].

These tools also help address integration challenges, which are crucial for successful multi-cloud strategies.

Handle Integration and Compatibility Issues

Seamless integration is essential for effective multi-cloud rightsizing, but it often comes with challenges. These include data integration, application compatibility, network infrastructure, and security compliance [21]. Using standard APIs and containerisation technologies like Docker or Kubernetes can simplify platform differences and improve portability [24].

API inconsistencies are a common hurdle [22]. To tackle this, organisations should prioritise vendor-neutral architectures and build microservices that require minimal modifications to run across different clouds [22]. Open-source tools and adherence to industry standards also play a key role in overcoming these barriers [23].

Selecting providers with established partnerships can further enhance service interoperability, boosting the value of multi-cloud investments. When evaluating solutions, consider factors like software compatibility, network performance, redundancy, security, and total cost of ownership [22].

Centralised management platforms or orchestration tools simplify these complexities by providing a unified interface for managing tasks across multiple clouds [24]. Standardising practices and procedures also reduces operational overhead [22].

A real-world example: Liantis achieved better resilience and cost savings by migrating from an Oracle Database on Microsoft Azure to the Oracle Exadata Database Service. This switch streamlined their architecture, improved latency, enhanced security, and lowered costs [22].

For organisations looking to implement these advanced strategies, Hokstad Consulting offers expertise in cloud cost engineering, helping businesses reduce expenses by 30–50% through tailored optimisation approaches.

Multi-Cloud Rightsizing Best Practices

Expanding on earlier strategies, these best practices are designed to maintain effective cost management and operational efficiency in ever-changing multi-cloud environments.

Conduct Regular Resource Audits

Frequent resource audits are key to maintaining data integrity and ensuring compliance [25]. Start by defining the audit's scope and compiling a detailed asset inventory. Leverage AI-powered tools to validate data accuracy and identify anomalies [25][26]. Security and configuration audits are equally important - they involve reviewing IAM policies, user permissions, access logs, and the status of ports, administrative interfaces, and compute instances. These steps not only help manage costs but also address potential vulnerabilities [27]. Real-time monitoring tools like SIEM, intrusion detection systems, and log analysis software provide additional layers of security and compliance [25].

Implement Policy-Driven Automation

Building on automation strategies, adopting policy-driven approaches can significantly reduce manual workloads, minimise errors, and accelerate deployments [16]. These automated policies can manage cost control, security, compliance, and routine IT operations simultaneously. Treating policies as code allows for versioning, controlled updates, and easy rollbacks [28]. Many multi-cloud platforms offer pre-configured and customisable policy options, enabling seamless governance across diverse cloud setups. Start with low-risk automation to test the waters, then expand to dynamic scaling based on performance and cost parameters.

Align Rightsizing with Cost and DevOps Plans

To ensure optimisation aligns with broader business goals, integrate rightsizing efforts with cost management and DevOps strategies. Research shows that only one in three organisations achieves its expected cloud savings, often due to misaligned strategies [29]. Cost optimisation isn’t just about cutting expenses - it’s about maximising value [31]. Promote financial accountability by giving teams clear visibility into spending and empowering them to make informed decisions. Use real-time monitoring to pinpoint underutilised resources and implement automation, such as budget thresholds or automatic shutdowns of idle instances, to enhance savings [29]. Regularly review pricing and billing data while monitoring for cost anomalies throughout the software development lifecycle to maintain financial efficiency [30]. Collaboration between DevOps, finance, and other departments, supported by FinOps frameworks, ensures rightsizing aligns with both operational and financial goals [29]. With 89% of organisations now using multiple cloud platforms, effective cost optimisation hinges on assigning the right resources to each workload based on its specific needs [32][30].

For businesses needing expert support to align rightsizing with their broader objectives, Hokstad Consulting provides cloud cost engineering services. Their expertise integrates seamlessly with DevOps transformation initiatives, helping organisations achieve meaningful cost savings while improving operational performance.

Conclusion

Managing multi-cloud environments effectively requires treating rightsizing as an ongoing strategy rather than a one-off task. With 89% of enterprises adopting multi-cloud approaches to reduce risk and increase flexibility [20], and research showing that up to 30% of cloud spending is wasted on idle or underused resources [33], the importance of consistent optimisation cannot be overstated.

Achieving success depends on understanding usage patterns and maintaining a proactive approach. Scheduling regular rightsizing, enforcing consistent resource tagging, and leveraging advanced cloud management tools are all essential steps [34].

Clear visibility and strong governance play a pivotal role. Proper tagging transforms billing data into actionable insights, empowering teams to take responsibility for their usage and spending. By combining strategic deployments, automation, and alignment with FinOps principles, organisations can achieve meaningful cost reductions without compromising service quality.

As the cloud industry continues to grow, the demand for effective rightsizing strategies will only increase. Gartner forecasts global cloud revenue to hit £723.4 billion by 2025, a 21% rise from the previous year [20]. This rapid growth underscores the need for ongoing improvement through training, aligning technical optimisation with business goals, and adopting practices like regular audits, policy-driven automation, and real-time monitoring. These measures form a strong foundation for managing costs in increasingly complex multi-cloud setups.

For organisations aiming to maximise this opportunity, working with experts such as Hokstad Consulting can provide tailored solutions that deliver sustainable savings. The key is to view rightsizing not just as a technical necessity, but as a strategic advantage.

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