Cutting a client’s AWS bill in half
50%
lower monthly AWS spend
- Where
- Janaki Technology, for a managed-services client
- Stack
- AWS Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, Savings Plans, AWS Budgets, S3 lifecycle rules, Terraform
The problem
The client’s AWS bill had grown month after month with no clear owner. Instances were sized for peaks that never came, test environments ran all night and weekend, and old volumes, snapshots and IP addresses kept costing money long after anyone used them.
What I did
- Tagged resources by team and environment so every dollar could be traced to an owner, then broke the bill down in Cost Explorer.
- Rightsized over-provisioned EC2 and database instances using Compute Optimizer and real utilization data, and moved suitable workloads to newer, cheaper instance types.
- Covered the steady baseline with Savings Plans, and moved interruptible non-production work to Spot.
- Scheduled dev and staging environments to shut down outside working hours.
- Removed unattached EBS volumes, stale snapshots, idle load balancers and unused Elastic IPs, and added S3 lifecycle rules to move old data to cheaper storage.
- Captured the changes in Terraform and set AWS Budgets alerts so costs stay down.
How the review ran
Tag and measure Find waste Rightsize and schedule Commit with Savings Plans Monitor with budgets
Result
Monthly AWS spend fell by 50% with no loss of performance or availability, and the client now gets an alert before costs drift up again.