The hidden cost of Cloud Excellence: A founding engineer’s journey

As a developer and architect who has spent years building cloud-native applications, I’ve always taken pride in creating systems that scale beautifully, perform brilliantly, and maintain rock-solid reliability. Like many of my peers, I followed the cloud best practices religiously — implementing auto-scaling, optimising performance, and ensuring high availability. Yet, there was always one critical aspect that seemed to slip through the cracks: Cost Optimisation.

This blind spot isn’t unique to me. Across the industry, developers and architects are trained to prioritise technical excellence, often at the expense of cost consciousness. We build robust systems that can handle any load, but we rarely stop to ask whether we’re over provisioning resources or if there’s a more cost-effective way to achieve our goals.

A penguin and the cloud, image generated by Image Playground

The Cost Awakening

The turning point came when I noticed a pattern across multiple projects: cloud bills that steadily crept upward, resources that sat idle during off-peak hours, and oversized instances that were “just to be safe.” These weren’t just minor inefficiencies — they represented significant financial waste that directly impacted companies’ bottom lines.

What struck me most was that this wasn’t a problem of negligence. It was a systematic oversight built into how we approach cloud architecture. We’ve become so focused on avoiding downtime and ensuring scalability that we’ve inadvertently created a culture where over provisioning is the safer choice.

Lakshmikanth Karur Rajamani, as a super hero, image generated by Image Playgorund

Why Now? The AI Opportunity

The timing for addressing this challenge couldn’t be better. We’re at a unique intersection where advanced AI capabilities can be applied to solve complex cloud optimisation problems. This isn’t just about basic resource scheduling anymore — it’s about intelligent systems that can:

/ Analyse complex usage patterns to predict resource needs
/ Automatically right-size infrastructure based on actual demand
/ Identity cost-saving opportunities without compromising performance
/ Make intelligent trade-offs between different cloud services and pricing models

A happy penguin with its savings, image generated by Image Playground

Introducing Cloudtrim: AI-Powered Cost Optimisation

This realisation led to the creation of Cloudtrim, a SaaS optimise their cloud costs without sacrificing performance or reliability. We’re leveraging AI agents to do what humans often struggle with: continuously monitoring and optimising cloud resources at scale.

Our AI agents work tirelessly to identity cost-saving opportunities, analysing everything from instance sizing to usage patterns. They can spot inefficiencies that might be invisible to human operators and suggest optimisations that maintain performance while reducing costs.

A penguin with a shovel, image generated by Image Playground

Beyond Just Cost Savings

While cost optimisation is our primary focus, Cloudtrim represents something bigger: a shift in how we think about cloud resource management. We believe that cost optimisation shouldn’t be an afterthought — it should be integrated into the development process just like security, scalability and reliability.

For SMBs, this is particularly crucial. Every dollar saved on cloud costs is a dollar that can be reinvested in growth, product development, or customer acquistion. In today’s competitive landscape, this efficiency can make the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

Penguin’s breakfast time, image generated by Image Playground

Looking Forward

As we launch Cloudtrim, our mission is clear: to make cloud cost optimisation accessible, automated and intelligent for SMBs. We’re excited to be at the forefront of using AI to solve this critical challenge, and we’re committed to helping businesses achieve the perfect balance of performance and cost-effectiveness.

This is just the beginning of our journey. As AI technology continues to evolve, so will our capabilities to help businesses optimise their cloud spending. We invite you to join us in this mission to make cloud computing more efficient and cost-effective for everyone.

Welcome to Cloudlagom, where we’re trimming the excess from your cloud costs, one optimisation at a time.

Written by Lakshmikanth Karur Rajamani, founding engineer at Cloudlagom.