ZWC Launched

Quick update. We launched a new product: Zero Waste Cloud.

You’re getting this because you were on my cybersecurity newsletter.

Problem first. Cloud bills keep climbing while unused stuff piles up. Non-prod running at night. Old snapshots. Idle IPs. Oversized databases. Independent studies say 20–50% of cloud spend is waste.

That waste is also attack surface. Unused security groups, orphaned service accounts, stale IAM roles. More things to misconfigure. More things to breach.

What Zero Waste Cloud does

1. Sign up → Connect your AWS or GCP account with a secure role

2. Start a cloud scan

3. Within a few minutes, you get a detailed list of exactly what to reconfigure and change, to save 20-50% of your cloud bill

You choose what to fix and when.

No surprise changes. No auto killing prod. No agents.

Security Matters. Cleaning up idle resources lowers cost and risk at the same time. Fewer public endpoints. Fewer credentials left behind. Less blast radius.

Training tips

Top 3 things to cut down Cloud Cost

Here’s 3 actions you can take right now to cut down costs, which very few teams do. Easy savings.

1. 10-minute orphaned storage cleanup
   AWS: aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters Name=status,Values=available --query 'Volumes[].VolumeId' --output text
   GCP: gcloud compute disks list --filter='-users:*' --format='value(name,zone,sizeGb)'
   Action: snapshot if needed, then delete. These are pure waste.

2. Kill the NAT tax
   AWS: Add Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, then alert on NATGatewayBytes > 0. Most internal traffic should bypass NAT.
   GCP: Enable Private Google Access for subnets that hit Google APIs, turn on Cloud NAT logging, and alert on egress spikes. Cut cross-AZ/region chatter.

3. Guardrails before the invoice
   AWS: Set Budgets + Anomaly Detection to Slack/Email. Turn on Compute Optimizer and act on underutilized EC2/RDS (CPU < 10–15% over 14 days).
   GCP: Set Cloud Billing Budgets with Pub/Sub alerts. Use Recommender for VM and Cloud SQL rightsizing. Track “spend per deploy” monthly; if it trends up, fix bloat.

P.S. If you’ve ever had an invoice-as-alert moment, hit reply. I’ll share a 10-minute setup for budgets and anomaly detection so it does not happen again.

Written by Mikael Almstedt
Founder - Zero Waste Cloud
https://zerowastecloud.io