👨🍳 Kitchen Humor: The $44.5 Billion Cloud Waste Problem
Let's talk about the elephant in the kitchen — or rather, the $44.5 billion worth of burnt ingredients we're projected to throw away in 2025.
The Numbers Don't Lie
According to the State of FinOps 2025 report, infrastructure cloud waste is expected to hit $44.5 billion this year. That's not a typo. That's billion with a B.
$44.5B
Projected cloud waste in 2025
The Comedy of Errors
The main cause? A disconnect between FinOps teams and development teams. Here's how the conversation usually goes:
Scene 1: The Forgotten Instance
Scene 2: The Safety Buffer
Scene 3: The Orphan Resources
Why This Happens
Different incentives
Devs optimize for reliability. FinOps optimizes for cost. Neither is wrong.
Fear of outages
Over-provisioning feels safer than right-sizing.
Lack of ownership
When nobody owns a resource, nobody deletes it.
Tribal knowledge loss
The person who created it left 18 months ago.
The Good News
Deloitte predicts $21 billion in potential savings for companies implementing FinOps tools in 2025. Some could cut costs by 40%.
The waste exists because optimization is hard. But it's not impossible.
$21B
Potential savings with FinOps tools
40%
Potential cost reduction
Chef's Recipe for Reducing Waste
1. Tag everything
No tag = no deploy. Make it policy.
2. Automate the obvious
Idle resources, unattached volumes, oversized instances — automate detection and alerting.
3. Make cost visible
When devs can see their team's spend, behavior changes.
4. Create shared incentives
Make cost efficiency part of engineering goals.
The Punchline
$44.5 billion in waste is embarrassing. But it's also an opportunity.
Every dollar of waste eliminated is a dollar available for actual innovation.
Time to clean up the kitchen.
🍲 Dive into the full recipe at cloudcostchefs.com
Learn practical strategies to eliminate cloud waste and optimize your infrastructure costs.
CloudCostChefs: Making cloud cost optimization practical, actionable, and occasionally funny. Because if you can't laugh at $44.5 billion in waste, you'll cry.