We Cut a $65K Cloud Bill by 60%. Here's Exactly How
The $65K Question
The CFO asked for a breakdown of the cloud bill. The CTO had no answer, just knew 'that's what the models cost to run.' Sound familiar? This is one of the most common conversations we have with engineering leaders. Cloud costs creep up gradually, nobody owns the bill, and by the time someone asks questions, the waste is baked into the infrastructure.
Week 1: The Audit
We start every FinOps engagement with a systematic audit. We map every resource to a team, a project, and a purpose. In this case, we found the usual suspects: RDS instances sized for peak traffic that happens 2 hours a day, development environments running 24/7 (including weekends), reserved instances purchased for workloads that no longer exist, and no auto-scaling configured on services that could easily scale down during off-hours.
Week 2: The Quick Wins
Some savings are immediate. We right-sized 12 RDS instances based on actual utilization data (most were using less than 20% of their allocated resources). We configured dev environments to shut down outside business hours. That alone saved $8K/month. We cancelled reserved instances that weren't being used and switched to savings plans that matched actual usage patterns.
Week 3: Structural Changes
The bigger savings came from architectural changes. We implemented auto-scaling policies based on actual traffic patterns, not worst-case estimates. We moved infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers. We consolidated redundant services that had accumulated over two years of rapid growth. And we set up real-time cost tracking dashboards broken down by team and project, so the question 'where is the money going?' always has an answer.
The Result
Monthly bill went from $65K to $26K, a 60% reduction. Performance stayed identical. Zero degradation. The engineering team now has visibility into costs by team and project, and new resources automatically get tagged and tracked. The CFO stopped asking hard questions because the answers are always available.