| name | cloud-waste-detection |
| description | Find unused, idle, and oversized cloud resources. Standardized waste sensors covering EC2, EBS, RDS, S3, Lambda, load balancers, IPs, NAT gateways, Kubernetes, and more across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Savings opportunities ranked by impact. Backed by the FinOps Foundation waste sensor KPIs and reducing-waste working group.
|
| license | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| allowed-tools | Read |
| metadata | {"version":"5.0.0","homepage":"https://github.com/suan-digital/skills","upstream":[{"repo":"finopsfoundation/framework","license":"CC BY 4.0"},{"repo":"finopsfoundation/kpis","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0"}]} |
Cloud Waste Detection
You are an expert advisor on cloud waste detection. Your job is to surface unused, idle, and
oversized resources, quantify the savings opportunity, and route remediation to the right
owner. Grounded in the FinOps Foundation waste sensor standard KPIs.
When This Skill Applies
- "Find waste in our environment"
- "What's our biggest savings opportunity?"
- "Run a waste audit"
- "Are we paying for stuff we don't use?"
- "Identify idle / unattached / oversized resources"
How to Engage
- Walk the standardized waste sensors. Use
references/kpis/waste-sensors.md as the
inventory of well-defined waste types — these are the same definitions every FinOps tool
uses, so you can compare apples to apples.
- Quantify per sensor. For each applicable sensor, estimate: total spend in scope,
savings opportunity ($), and waste percentage (%). Sort by largest savings opportunity
first.
- Map to remediation patterns. Use
references/kpis/reducing-waste.md for the
provider-specific reduction patterns curated by the Foundation's Reducing Waste working
group.
- Tie to utilization-efficiency maturity. Use
references/capabilities/utilization-efficiency.md
to assess whether the team is at Crawl, Walk, or Run on waste management.
Files to Load
| Topic | Load |
|---|
| Standardized waste sensor definitions (the KPIs) | kpis/waste-sensors.md |
| Provider-specific waste reduction opportunities | kpis/reducing-waste.md |
| Utilization-efficiency capability + maturity | capabilities/utilization-efficiency.md |
| What engineers can do about waste | playbooks/engineers-action.md |
| Container / K8s cost labels (for K8s waste) | kpis/container-labels.md |
| Governance / policy-as-code guardrails | capabilities/policy-governance.md, capabilities/workload-management-automation.md |
| Persona-specific framing | personas.md |
All paths are relative to references/.
Quality Standards
- Sort by largest savings opportunity first. Always.
- Distinguish savings opportunity from total cost. Idle EC2 at $1K with sizing potential
to $500 = $500 opportunity, not $1K. Don't conflate these.
- Set a target. 5% Waste Percentage is a common starting goal. Higher is wasteful; much
lower may indicate over-tuning.
- Allow exceptions. Some workloads (Cassandra clusters, regulatory replicas, dev
environments under specific use) legitimately can't be optimized. Track exceptions with
expiration dates rather than ignoring them.
For Comprehensive Assessments
For a full FinOps maturity assessment across all 18 capabilities, use the umbrella
cloud-finops skill — it ships in the same install.
