What is cloud optimization? How to Optimize Cloud Usage

Quick Digest

This article dives deep into what cloud optimization really means, why it matters more than ever, and how to implement it effectively. Each section includes expert insights, real data, and forward‑looking trends to help you build a resilient, cost‑efficient, and sustainable cloud strategy.

Understanding Cloud Optimization

How does cloud optimization differ from simply cutting costs?

Cloud optimization is about aligning resource usage with actual demand, not just negotiating better pricing. Traditional cost reduction focuses on lowering the rate you pay (through long‑term commitments or discounts), while usage optimization ensures you don’t pay for capacity you don’t need. ProsperOps distinguishes between these two approaches—rate optimization (e.g., reserved instances) can reduce per‑unit cost by up to 72 %, but only when workloads are right‑sized and efficiently scheduled. Usage optimization goes further by matching provisioned resources to workload requirements, removing idle assets, and automating scale‑down.

Expert Insights

• ProsperOps: Emphasizes that rate and usage optimization must work together; long‑term discounts can save up to 72% when workloads are right‑sized.
  
  
• FinOps Foundation: Lists opportunities such as storage optimization, autoscaling, containerization, spot instances, network optimization, scheduling, and automation as essential tactics.
  
  
• Clarifai’s Compute Orchestration: Provides GPU fractioning, batching, and serverless autoscaling to optimize AI workloads across clouds and on‑premises, cutting compute costs by over 70%

Why Cloud Optimization Matters in 2025

Why is optimization critical now?

The year 2025 marks a turning point for cloud usage. Rapid AI adoption and macroeconomic pressures have led to unprecedented scrutiny of cloud spend and sustainability:

• Widespread inefficiencies: Research shows 60% of organizations underutilize network resources and 90% overprovision compute. Idle resources and sprawl lead to waste.
  
  
• Surging AI costs: A survey of engineering teams revealed that AI budgets are set to rise 36 % in 2025, yet only about half of organizations can measure the return on those investments. Without optimization, these costs will spiral.
  
  
• Growing environmental impact: Data centers already consume about 1.5% of global electricity and 1 % of total CO₂ emissions. Training state‑of‑the‑art models can use the same energy as tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands of liters of water. In 2025, sustainability is no longer optional; regulators and communities demand action.
  
  
• C‑suite involvement: Rising cloud prices and regulatory scrutiny have brought finance leaders into cloud decisions. Forrester notes that CFOs now influence cloud strategy and governance.
  
  

Expert Insights

• CloudKeeper report: Finds that AI and automation can reduce unexpected cost spikes by 20 % and improve rightsizing by 15–30 %. It also notes that multi‑cloud modernization (e.g., ARM‑based processors) can cut compute costs by 40 %.
  
  
• CloudZero research: Reports that AI budgets will rise 36 % and only half of organizations can assess ROI—a clear call for better monitoring and measurement.
  
  
• Data Center Knowledge: Describes how sustainability became an operational constraint, with AI workloads stressing power, water and land resources, leading to new design models and policies.

Core Strategies for Usage Optimization

What are the key tactics to eliminate waste?

Optimizing cloud usage is a multi‑disciplinary discipline involving engineering, finance and operations. The following tactics—grounded in industry best practices—form the basis of any optimization program:

1. Visibility and Tagging: Create a single source of truth for cloud resources. Accurate tagging and cost allocation enable accountability and granular insights.
   
   
2. Rightsizing Compute and Storage: Match instance sizes and storage tiers to workload requirements. Rightsizing can involve downsizing over‑provisioned instances, scaling to zero during idle periods, and moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper tiers.
   
   
3. Shutting Down Idle Resources: Schedule or automate shutdown of development, staging or experiment environments when not in use. Tools can detect idle VMs, unused snapshots, or unattached volumes and decommission them.
   
   
4. Autoscaling and Load Balancing: Use managed services and autoscaling policies to scale out when demand spikes and scale back in when demand drops. Combine horizontal scaling with load balancing to spread traffic efficiently.
   
   
5. Serverless and Containers: Move episodic or event‑driven workloads to serverless functions and run microservices in containers or Kubernetes clusters. Containers allow dense packing of workloads, while serverless eliminates idle capacity.
   
   
6. Spot and Commitment Discounts: Use spot/preemptible instances for batch and fault‑tolerant workloads and pair them with reserved or savings plans for baseline usage. Dynamic portfolio management yields significant savings.
   
   
7. Data Transfer and Network Optimization: Optimize data egress and ingress by placing workloads in the same region, using edge caches and compressing data. For network heavy workloads, choose providers or colocation partners with predictable egress pricing.
   
   
8. Scheduling and Orchestration: Use cron‑based or event‑driven schedulers to start and stop resources automatically. Clarifai’s compute orchestration can scale down to zero and batch inference requests to minimize idle time.
   
   
9. Automation and AI: Implement automated cost anomaly detection, continuous monitoring and predictive analytics. Modern FinOps platforms use machine learning to forecast spend and generate actionable recommendations.

Expert Insights

• FinOps Foundation: Recommends storage optimization, serverless computing, autoscaling, containerization, spot instances, scheduling and network optimization as high‑impact areas.
  
  
• Flexential research: Emphasizes the importance of visibility, governance and continuous optimization and outlines tactics such as rightsizing, shutting down idle resources, using reserved instances and tiered storage.
  
  
• Clarifai compute orchestration: Offers an automated control plane that orchestrates GPU fractioning, batching, autoscaling and spot instances across any cloud or on‑prem hardware, enabling cost‑efficient AI deployments.

Rightsizing and Compute Optimization

How do you right‑size compute resources?

Rightsizing is the practice of tailoring compute and memory resources to the actual demand of your applications. The process involves continuous measurement, analysis and adjustment:

1. Collect metrics: Monitor CPU, memory, storage and network utilization at granular intervals. Tag resources properly and use observability tools to correlate metrics with workloads.
   
   
2. Identify under‑utilized instances: Use FinOps tools or providers’ recommendations to find VMs running at low utilization. CloudKeeper notes that 90 % of compute resources are over‑provisioned.
   
   
3. Resize or migrate: Downgrade to smaller instance sizes, consolidate workloads using container orchestration, or move to more efficient architectures (e.g., ARM‑based processors) that can cut costs by 40 %.
   
   
4. Schedule non‑production environments: Turn off dev/test environments outside working hours, and use “scale to zero” functions for serverless or containerized workloads.
   
   
5. Leverage spot and reserved capacity: For baseline workloads, commit to reserved capacity. For bursty or batch jobs, use spot instances with automation to handle interruptions.
   
   
6. Use GPU fractioning and batching: For AI workloads, Clarifai’s compute orchestration splits GPUs among multiple jobs, packs models efficiently and batches inference requests, delivering 70 %+ cost savings.

Expert Insights

• CloudKeeper: Reports that modernization strategies like adopting ARM‑based compute and serverless architectures reduce costs by up to 40 %.
  
  
• Flexential: Advocates for rightsizing compute and storage and shutting down idle resources to achieve continuous optimization.
  
  
• Clarifai: Notes that GPU fractioning and time slicing in its compute orchestration platform enable customers to cut compute costs by over 70 % and run AI workloads on any hardware.

Storage and Data Transfer Optimization

How can you reduce storage and network costs?

Storage and data transfer often hide large amounts of waste. An effective strategy addresses both capacity and egress:

1. Tiered storage and lifecycle policies: Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes (e.g., infrequent access, cold storage) and set automated lifecycle rules to archive or delete old snapshots.
   
   
2. Snapshot and volume cleanup: Delete outdated snapshots and detach unused volumes. The FinOps Foundation highlights storage optimization as one of the first actions in usage optimization.
   
   
3. Data compression and deduplication: Use compression algorithms and deduplication to reduce data footprint before storage or transfer.
   
   
4. Optimize data egress: Place compute and data in the same regions to minimize egress charges, use CDN/edge caches for frequently accessed content, and minimize cross‑cloud data movement.
   
   
5. Network and transfer choices: Evaluate different providers’ network pricing structures. In multi‑cloud environments, use direct connections or colocation facilities to reduce egress fees and latency.
   
   

Expert Insights

• FinOps Foundation: Lists removing snapshots and unattached volumes, using lifecycle policies and leveraging tiered storage as high‑impact actions.
  
  
• Flexential: Advises adopting tiered storage, lifecycle management and data egress optimization as part of continuous cost governance.
  
  
• Data Center Knowledge: Notes that water and energy usage of AI data centers is pushing operators to look at efficient cooling and resource stewardship, which includes optimizing storage density and data placement.

Modernization: Serverless, Containers & Predictive Analytics

How does modernization drive optimization?

Modern application architectures minimize idle resources and enable fine‑grained scaling:

• Serverless computing: This model charges only for execution time, eliminating the cost of idle capacity. It is ideal for event‑driven workloads like API calls, IoT triggers and data processing. Serverless also improves scalability and reduces operational complexity.
  
  
• Containerization and orchestration: Containers package applications and dependencies, enabling high density and portability across clouds. Kubernetes and container orchestrators handle scaling, scheduling, and resource sharing, improving utilization.
  
  
• Predictive cost analytics: Using historical data and machine learning to forecast spending helps teams allocate resources proactively. Predictive analytics can identify cost anomalies before they occur and suggest rightsizing actions.
  
  
• Modernization guidance and AI agents: Major cloud providers are rolling out AI‑driven tools to help modernize applications and reduce costs. For example, application modernization guidance uses AI agents to analyze code and recommend cost‑efficient architecture changes.
  
  

Expert Insights

• Ternary blog: Explains that serverless computing reduces infrastructure costs, improves scalability and enhances operational efficiency, especially when combined with FinOps monitoring. Predictive cost analytics improves budget forecasting and resource allocation.
• FinOps X 2025 announcements: Cloud providers announced AI agents for cost optimization and application modernization guidance that offload complex tasks and accelerate modernization.
• DEV community article: Highlights multi‑cloud Kubernetes and AI‑driven cloud optimization as key trends, along with observability and CI/CD pipelines for multi‑cloud deployments.

Multi‑Cloud & Hybrid Strategies

Why choose multi‑cloud?

Multi‑cloud strategies, once seen as sprawl, are now purposeful plays. Using multiple providers for different workloads improves resilience, avoids vendor lock‑in and allows organizations to match workloads to the most cost‑effective or specialized services. Key considerations:

• Flexibility and independence: Multi‑cloud strategies offer vendor independence, improved performance and high availability. They allow teams to use one provider for compute‑intensive tasks and another for AI services or backup.
  
  
• Modern orchestration tools: Tools like Kubernetes, Terraform and Clarifai’s compute orchestration manage workloads across clouds and on‑premises. Multi‑cloud Kubernetes simplifies deployment and scaling.
  
  
• Challenges: Complexity, security and cost management are major hurdles. Accurate tagging, unified observability and cross‑cloud monitoring are essential.
  
  
• Strategic portfolio approach: Forrester notes that multi‑cloud is now muscle, not fat—enterprises intentionally separate workloads across providers for sovereignty, performance and strategic independence.

Implementation Steps

1. Define strategy: Assess business needs and select providers accordingly. Consider data locality, compliance and service specialization.
   
   
2. Use infrastructure as code (IaC): Tools like Terraform or Pulumi declare infrastructure across providers.
   
   
3. Implement CI/CD pipelines: Integrate continuous deployment across clouds to ensure consistent rollouts.
   
   
4. Set up observability: Use Prometheus, Grafana or cloud‑native monitoring to collect metrics across providers.
   
   
5. Plan for connectivity and security: Leverage cloud transit gateways, secure VPNs or colocation hubs; adopt zero trust principles and unified identity management.
   
   
6. Automate cost allocation: Adopt the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS specification for multi‑cloud cost data. FinOps X 2025 announced expanded support from major providers for FOCUS 1.0 and upcoming versions.

Expert Insights

• DEV community article: Suggests that multi‑cloud strategies enhance resilience, avoid vendor lock‑in and optimize performance, but require robust orchestration, monitoring and security.
  
  
• Forrester (trends 2025): Notes that multi‑cloud has become strategic, with clouds separated by workload to exploit different architectures and mitigate dependency.
  
  
• FinOps X 2025: Providers are adopting FOCUS billing exports and AI‑powered cost optimization features to simplify multi‑cloud cost management.

AI & Automation in Cloud Optimization

How is AI reshaping cloud cost management?

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a workload—it’s also a tool for optimizing the infrastructure it runs on. AI and machine learning help predict demand, recommend rightsizing, detect anomalies and automate decisions:

• Predictive analytics: FinOps platforms analyze historical usage and seasonal patterns to forecast future spend and identify anomalies. AI can consider holiday seasons, new workload migrations or sudden traffic spikes.
  
  
• AI agents for cost optimization: At FinOps X 2025, major providers unveiled AI‑powered agents that analyze millions of resources, rationalize overlapping savings opportunities and provide detailed action plans. These agents simplify decision‑making and improve cost accountability.
  
  
• Automated recommendations: New tools recommend I/O optimized configurations, cost comparison analyses and pricing calculators to help teams model what‑if scenarios and plan migrations.
  
  
• Cost anomaly detection and AI‑powered remediation: Enhanced FinOps hubs highlight resources with low utilization (e.g., VMs at 5 % usage) and send optimization reports to engineering teams. AI also supports automated remediation across container clusters and serverless services.
  
  
• Clarifai’s AI orchestration: Clarifai’s compute orchestration automatically packs models, batches requests and scales across GPU clusters, applying machine‑learning algorithms to optimize inference throughput and cost. Its Local Runners allow organizations to run models on their own hardware, preserving data privacy while reducing cloud spend.

Expert Insights

• SSRN paper: Notes that AI‑driven strategies, including predictive analytics and resource allocation, help organizations reduce costs while maintaining performance.
  
  
• FinOps X 2025: Describes new AI agents, FOCUS billing exports and forecasting enhancements that improve cost reporting and accuracy.
  
  
• Clarifai: Offers agentic orchestration for AI workloads—automated packaging, scheduling and scaling to maximize GPU utilization and minimize idle time.

Sustainability & Green Cloud

How does sustainability influence optimization strategies?

As AI demands soar, sustainability has become a defining factor in where and how data centers are built and operated. Key themes:

• Energy efficiency: Running workloads in optimized cloud environments can be 4.1 times more energy efficient and reduce carbon footprint by up to 99 % compared with typical enterprise data centers. Using purpose‑built silicon can further reduce emissions for compute‑heavy workloads.
  
  
• Water and cooling: Sustainability pressures in 2025 highlight water use effectiveness (WUE) and cooling innovations. Data centers must balance performance with resource stewardship and adopt strategies like heat reuse and liquid cooling.
  
  
• Renewable energy and carbon reporting: Providers and enterprises are investing in renewable power (solar, wind, hydro), and carbon emissions reporting is becoming standard. Reporting mechanisms use region‑specific emission factors to calculate footprints.
  
  
• Colocation and edge: Shared colocation facilities and regional edge sites can lower emissions through multi‑tenant efficiencies and shorter data paths.
  
  
• Public and policy pressure: Communities and policymakers are scrutinizing AI data centers for water use, noise, and grid impact. Policies around emissions, water rights and land use influence site selection and investment.

Expert Insights

• Data Center Knowledge: Reports that sustainability moved from aspiration to operational constraint in 2025, with AI growth stressing power, water and land resources. It highlights strategies like optimizing WUE, renewable energy, and colocation to meet climate goals.
  
  
• AWS study: Shows that migrating workloads to optimized cloud environments can reduce carbon footprint by up to 99 %, especially when paired with purpose‑built processors.
  
  
• CloudZero sustainability report: Points out that generative AI training uses huge amounts of electricity and water, with training large models consuming as much power as tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands of liters of water.

Clarifai’s Approach to Cloud Optimization

How does Clarifai help optimize AI workloads?

Clarifai is known for its leadership in AI, and its Compute Orchestration and Local Runners products offer concrete ways to optimize cloud usage:

• Compute Orchestration: Clarifai provides a unified control plane that orchestrates AI workloads across any environment—public cloud, on‑premises, or air‑gapped. It automatically deploys models on any hardware and manages compute clusters and node pools for training and inference. Key optimization features include:
  
  
  • GPU fractioning and time slicing: Splits GPUs among multiple models, increasing utilization and reducing idle time. Customers have reported cutting compute costs by more than 70 %.
    
    
  • Batching and streaming: Batches inference requests to improve throughput and supports streaming inference, processing up to 1.6 million inputs per second with five‑nines reliability.
    
    
  • Serverless autoscaling: Automatically scales clusters up or down to match demand, including the ability to scale to zero, minimizing idle costs.
    
    
  • Hybrid & multi‑cloud support: Deploys across public clouds or on‑premises. You can run compute in your own environment and communicate outbound only, improving security and allowing you to use pre‑committed cloud spend.
    
    
  • Model packing: Packs multiple models into a single GPU, reducing compute usage by up to 3.7× and achieving 60–90 % cost savings depending on configuration.
    
    
• Local Runners: Clarifai’s Local Runners allow you to run AI models on your own hardware—laptops, servers or private clouds—while maintaining unified API access. This means:
  
  
  • Data remains local, addressing privacy and compliance requirements.
    
    
  • Cost savings: You can leverage existing hardware instead of paying for cloud GPUs.
    
    
  • Easy integration: A single command registers your hardware with Clarifai’s platform, enabling you to combine local models with Clarifai’s hosted models and other tools.
    
    
  • Use case flexibility: Ideal for token‑hungry language models or sensitive data that must stay on‑premises. Supports agent frameworks and plug‑ins to integrate with existing AI workflows.

Expert Insights

• Clarifai customers: Report cost reductions of over 70 % from GPU fractioning and autoscaling.
  
  
• Clarifai documentation: Highlights the ability to deploy compute anywhere at any scale and achieve 60–90 % cost savings by combining serverless autoscaling, model packing and pre‑committed spend.
  
  
• Local Runners page: Notes that running models locally reduces public cloud GPU costs, keeps data private and enables rapid experimentation.

Future Trends & Emerging Topics

What’s next for cloud optimization?

Looking beyond 2025, several trends are shaping the future of cloud cost management:

• AI agents and FinOps automation: The emergence of AI agents that analyze usage and generate actionable insights will continue to grow. Providers announced AI agents that rationalize overlapping savings opportunities and offer self‑service recommendations. FinOps platforms will become more autonomous, capable of self‑optimizing workloads.
  
  
• FOCUS standard adoption: The FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS) standardizes cost reporting across providers. At FinOps X 2025, major providers committed to supporting FOCUS and launched exports for BigQuery and other analytics tools. This will improve multi‑cloud cost visibility and governance.
  
  
• Zero trust and sovereign clouds: As regulations tighten, organizations will adopt zero trust architectures and sovereign cloud options to ensure data control and compliance across borders. Workload placement decisions will balance cost, performance and jurisdictional requirements.
  
  
• Supercloud and seamless edge: The concept of supercloud, in which cross‑cloud services and edge computing converge, will gain traction. Workloads will move seamlessly between clouds, on‑premises and edge devices, requiring intelligent orchestration and unified APIs.
  
  
• Autonomic and sustainable clouds: The future includes self‑optimizing clouds that monitor, predict and adjust resources automatically, reducing human intervention. Sustainability strategies will incorporate renewable energy, water stewardship, liquid cooling, circular procurement and potentially small modular nuclear reactors.
  
  
• Sustainability reporting: Carbon reporting and water usage metrics will become standardized. Tools will integrate emissions data into cost dashboards, enabling users to optimize for both dollars and carbon.
  
  
• AI ROI measurement: As AI budgets grow, organizations will invest in tooling to measure ROI and unit economics, linking cloud spend directly to business outcomes. Clarifai’s analytics and third‑party FinOps tools will play a key role.

Expert Insights

• Forrester (cloud trends): Predicts that multi‑cloud strategies and AI‑native services will reshape cloud markets. CFOs will play a larger role in cloud governance.
  
  
• FinOps X 2025: Illustrates how AI agents, FOCUS support and carbon reporting are evolving into mainstream features.
  
  
• Data Center Knowledge: Notes that sustainability pressures, water scarcity and policy interventions will dictate where data centers are built and what technologies (renewables, SMRs) are adopted.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is cloud optimization only about cutting costs?

No. While reducing spend is a key benefit, cloud optimization is about maximizing business value. It encompasses performance, scalability, reliability and sustainability. Properly optimized workloads can accelerate innovation by freeing budgets and resources, improve user experience and ensure compliance. For AI workloads, optimization also enables faster inference and training.

How often should I revisit my optimization strategy?

Cloud environments and business needs change rapidly. Adopt a continuous optimization mindset—monitor usage daily, review rightsizing and reserved capacity monthly, and conduct deep assessments quarterly. FinOps culture encourages ongoing collaboration between engineering, finance and product teams.

Do I need to adopt multi‑cloud to optimize costs?

Multi‑cloud is not mandatory but can be advantageous. Use it when you need vendor independence, specialized services or regional resilience. However, multi‑cloud increases complexity, so evaluate whether the added benefits justify the overhead.

How does Clarifai handle data privacy when running models locally?

Clarifai’s Local Runners allow you to deploy models on your own hardware, meaning your data never leaves your environment. You still benefit from Clarifai’s unified API and orchestration, but you retain full control over data and compliance. This approach also reduces reliance on cloud GPUs, saving costs.

What metrics should I track to gauge optimization success?

Key metrics include cost per workload, waste rate (unused or over‑provisioned resources), percentage of spend under committed pricing, variance against budget, carbon footprint per workload and service‑level objectives. Clarifai’s dashboards and FinOps tools can integrate these metrics for real‑time visibility.

By embracing a holistic cloud optimization strategy—combining cultural changes, technical best practices, AI‑driven automation, sustainability initiatives and innovative tools like Clarifai’s compute orchestration and local runners—organizations can thrive in the AI‑driven era. Optimizing usage is no longer optional; it’s the key to unlocking innovation, reducing environmental impact and preparing for the future of distributed, intelligent cloud computing.