A multi-account AWS estate had quietly grown for two years. A focused FinOps pass cut the monthly bill by a third — without slowing anything down.
Cloud bills rarely spike. They drift. A test environment left running, an over-sized database, a snapshot policy nobody revisited — each is small, and together they add up to a number that makes the CFO wince. One UAE retail group asked us to look. We cut their AWS bill by 35% in 30 days, with no impact on performance.
Step 1 — Find the waste
We started with a full audit across every account: idle instances, unattached storage, forgotten environments, and resources sized for a load that never arrived. Roughly a fifth of the spend was on things nobody was using.
Step 2 — Rightsize and commit
Next, we matched instance sizes to actual usage and moved steady workloads onto savings plans. Paying on-demand prices for predictable, always-on workloads is one of the most common — and most expensive — cloud mistakes.
Step 3 — Make it stick
Cost optimization that isn't governed comes straight back. We put tagging, budgets and per-team cost visibility in place so the savings hold and new waste gets caught early. Thirty days in, the bill was a third lower — and staying there.