Your first OCI cost optimization sprint.

This is an OCI cost fundamentals exercise, and OCI has levers the other clouds do not. Here is the week by week plan and where the distinct OCI savings sit.

Start from Cost Analysis and usage reports

Begin in the OCI Cost Analysis console and the detailed usage reports, broken down by compartment. Cost Analysis is fine for the first look, but the usage reports are the granular record you attribute spend with. Compartments are OCI's main cost structure, so if they are organised by team and environment the sprint moves fast; if not, sorting that out is step one. The fuller picture lives in the OCI cost optimization guide.

Week one: the quick wins

Week one is discovery plus the savings that carry no performance risk.

• Stop idle instances. Compute running at near zero utilization, often forgotten test environments.
• Delete unattached block volumes. Storage left behind when instances were terminated bills every month for nothing.
• Schedule non production off. Dev, test, and staging rarely need nights and weekends; shutting them down cuts those environments by well over half their hours.
• Check egress patterns. OCI egress is materially cheaper than the hyperscalers, but it is not free, and architecture that moves data needlessly still costs.

Week two: flexible shapes, licensing, then commitments

Week two is the working half, run with the engineering teams in the room.

Right size flexible shapes first. OCI flexible compute shapes let you set the exact cores and memory per instance rather than picking a fixed size, so right sizing can be tighter than on fixed instance families where you round up. Get every workload to its true size before committing to anything.

Review database licensing. The license included versus BYOL choice changes database economics significantly. If you hold existing Oracle licences with the right support, BYOL can be far cheaper than license included; if you do not, license included avoids a separate purchase. Decide this per database before sizing credits.

Then plan Universal Credits and Support Rewards. Size Universal Credits, available as annual flex or pay as you go, to the steady state your forecast can defend, and factor in Support Rewards, which let OCI usage earn credits that offset Oracle technology software support fees. For an organisation with a large Oracle support bill, that offset is a real part of the math. Like all enterprise credit structures, annual flex carries use it or lose it risk, so coverage follows a defensible forecast.

What turns a sprint into a flat bill?

A sprint with no owner reverts. Before closing it, assign the recurring checks: an idle instance and unattached volume report in the monthly review, an auto shutdown default for new non production, and a quarterly review of Universal Credits burn down and the Support Rewards offset against the Oracle support renewal. This is the discipline that holds the 31 percent median reduction we see in the first 90 days. The OCI Cost Analysis console recommends some of this, but it recommends, it does not decide, so confirm each move against real workload behaviour. The cross cloud view sits in the cloud cost optimization guide, and the standing rhythm in the OCI spend review cadence.

Run your first OCI sprint with us

We run the first OCI cost sprint with your teams, bank the quick wins in week one, size flexible shapes precisely, and plan credits around the Support Rewards offset. Our guarantee: we reduce your cloud spend or we reimburse our service fee.