Cloud Cost Report
How Businesses are Allocating Cloud Spend in Q2 of 2025
Fresh off the quarterly earnings for Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, we are releasing the Q2 2025 Cloud Cost Report, an analysis of cloud usage based on anonymized Vantage customer usage. Vantage is a cloud cost visibility and optimization platform, with a unique view into industry trends, thanks to tens of thousands of connected infrastructure accounts across 20+ cloud providers. To discuss this report in more detail, join our Slack Community of over 1,000 engineering leaders, FinOps professionals, and CFOs. View past reports here.
Top services by spend across AWS, GCP, and Azure
The superscalers, AWS, GCP, and Azure, are expanding their market reach through core cloud services, compute, storage, and databases, which have remained in the tiop 3 services by spend for several quarters.
Data transfer, AI, and logging are also major contributors to cloud spend, with AI becoming a driving factor for cloud spend growth and provider selection.
49.99% of AWS EC2 spend is on On-Demand.
24.92% of Amazon S3 spend is from Standard Storage.
m6 instances account for 18.30% of AWS EC2 spend.
Logging accounts for a significant portion of cloud spend
Companies of all sizes are spending a significant portion of their cloud budgets on logging, with larger companies spending a larger percentage.
Logging is a necessary part of cloud infrastructure, but also is a large optimization opportunity. By only logging the necessary data, reducing retention durations, and using less expensive log classes when applicable, companies can reduce their cloud costs without sacrificing observability.
Users stick with their chosen OpenAI model
Two quarters ago, when we analyzed the top 10 OpenAI models by spend, we saw significant movement as users experimented with preview releases and the latest versions.
This quarter, the top 10 is far more stable, suggesting that users are sticking with their chosen models rather than frequently switching.
EC2 Instance Popularity
m6 instances rose to the top of the leaderboard halfway through last quarter. This quarter, they remain in the top spot, as c6 instances begin to overtake c5 instances in percent spend.
Another trend to watch is the increasing usage of m7 and c7 instances. These instances are the next generation of compute and general-purpose instances, and are gradually becoming more popular as companies upgrade their infrastructure. Based on historical trends, we expect to see these instances pass their predecessors in percent spend within the next three quarters.
Security spend is growing across providers
Microsoft Defender for Cloud often appears in Azure's top 10 services by spend. Taking a closer look at all security services by provider, we can see that security, like logging, is a large contributor to cloud spend.
While these services are essential, they can add up quickly. As companies scale, security tooling often grows alongside usage of core compute and storage services, making it one of the fastest-rising categories of cloud spend.
Amazon RDS Extended Support Cost Distribution
RDS Extended Support costs are often overlooked by companies. This cost is an additional fee that is charged to companies using RDS instances past the end of standard support date. Most companies spend very little on Extended Support in relation to all RDS costs, with 48% of companies that have RDS Extended Support costs spending less than 10% of their RDS costs on Extended Support.
However for some, it accounts for a significant portion of their RDS costs, with 11.2% of companies that have RDS Extended Support costs spending more than 50% of their RDS costs on Extended Support.
It's a easy upgrade to avoid the cost, but some companies are slow to adopt, highlighting how companies overlook cost optimization opportunities, even when it's a simple upgrade.