Datadog has released its initial State of Cloud Costs report, which identified factors that shape the costs of hundreds of organizations using Datadog Cloud Cost Management to monitor their AWS spend. The report reveals themes such as resource utilization, adoption of emerging technologies, and participation in commitment-based discount programs affecting cloud environments and costs. To optimize cloud environment costs, best practices include identifying and reducing wasted container spend, migrating away from legacy AWS services, managing cross-AZ data transfer costs, and using commitment-based discounts. Datadog provides tools to analyze utilization and cost efficiency of containerized environments, including EKS, ECS, and Kubernetes on EC2, allowing users to identify and fix underutilized container infrastructure, monitor performance data, and apply autoscaling to optimize clusters and workloads. Additionally, Datadog offers guidance on revising resource requests to mitigate wasted spend, enabling continuous optimization of cloud environments.