The Cloud Rent Keeps Going Up. Let's Fix It.

Infrastructure costs for modern applications can unexpectedly rise due to factors like data egress pricing, which often goes underestimated but becomes significant as applications scale. Fastly suggests that with the right architecture and platform, it's possible to reduce unnecessary origin traffic and control egress costs. This involves treating Cache Hit Ratio (CHR) as a business metric, normalizing request keys, leveraging "stale" headers for resilience, using smart purging techniques, and consolidating traffic with an Origin Shield to centralize requests and save on egress charges. Cache Reservation can protect high-demand content from eviction, ensuring predictable availability and cost efficiency, while reconsidering the storage of large assets can further optimize expenses. Fastly's Origin Inspector provides real-time visibility into data flow, helping teams manage costs proactively by identifying cost drivers and validating optimizations. By adopting disciplined caching, protected edge storage, and an edge-native content serving approach, businesses can better control their infrastructure expenses and scale effectively, viewing rising costs as a manageable design choice rather than an inevitability.