Last quarter, a manufacturing client reached out with a serious AWS cost optimization challenge. Their AWS bill had grown from $22,000 to $38,000 per month over eight months, with no business growth to justify the increase. The CFO was threatening to abandon their cloud initiative entirely.
After conducting our comprehensive AWS cost optimization audit, we identified $200,000 in annual waste and eliminated it within one week. Here’s exactly what we found and how we fixed it.
The Smoking Gun: $41,000 in “Ghost” Resources
The biggest shock wasn’t sophisticated cost optimization. It was basic housekeeping. Organizations waste an average of 32% of cloud spend on resources they don’t even know exist.
Our client had 23 EC2 instances running 24/7 that were created for a “quick test” six months earlier. Cost: $3,400 per month. They had seven load balancers routing traffic to nothing. Cost: $175 per month each. Dozens of abandoned EBS volumes were attached to terminated instances, burning $2,100 monthly.
The killer? Three massive c5.4xlarge instances running their main application at 15% CPU utilization. They needed c5.xlarge instances at most. This single mistake was costing them $2,800 every month.
The $96,000 Reserved Instance Disaster
Here’s where it gets painful. They had purchased $8,000 worth of Reserved Instance commitments for instance types they stopped using months ago. Meanwhile, their actual workloads were running on On-Demand pricing, paying full retail rates.
Reserved Instances provide up to 72% discount compared to On-Demand pricing. But only if you buy the right ones. Our client was getting zero benefit from their commitments while paying maximum price for their real usage.
The fix: We exchanged their unused Reserved Instances for the correct types and immediately cut their compute costs by $8,000 monthly.
The Storage Nightmare: $18,000 in Wasted Capacity
Their S3 strategy was “store everything in Standard tier forever.” Three years of data, accessed maybe once per quarter, sitting in the most expensive storage class available.
We implemented S3 Intelligent Tiering and lifecycle policies that automatically moved cold data to cheaper tiers. Immediate savings: $1,400 per month. The data became more accessible, not less, because we set up proper metadata tagging.
The real kicker? They were paying for 2TB of EBS snapshots from servers that were deleted over a year ago. Another $800 monthly down the drain.
The Network Tax: $7,200 Nobody Noticed
Data transfer costs are AWS’s silent killer. Our client had resources scattered across three regions with no architectural reason. Every database query, every file transfer, every backup operation was crossing region boundaries unnecessarily.
We consolidated their infrastructure into a single region and implemented VPC endpoints for S3 access. Monthly savings: $600. Performance actually improved because latency dropped by 40%.
The Five-Minute Daily AWS Cost Optimization Habit That Prevents This
The real tragedy? All of this was preventable with basic monitoring. We set up AWS Budgets with alerts at 80% and 100% of expected spend. We configured Cost Anomaly Detection to flag unusual patterns. We implemented automated resource scheduling to shut down dev/test environments nights and weekends.
Total setup time: 45 minutes. Monthly prevention value: $16,700.
The Psychological Shift That Changes Everything
After we eliminated the waste, something interesting happened. The CFO went from cloud skeptic to cloud advocate. With costs under control, she approved investments in machine learning, global expansion, and improved disaster recovery.
The IT team gained credibility. They went from cost center to strategic enabler. The $200,000 annual savings funded initiatives that drove real business growth.
The Three AWS Cost Optimization Questions Every User Should Ask
Based on 150+ AWS cost optimization audits, here are the questions that reveal the biggest savings opportunities:
What’s running that shouldn’t be? Use AWS Config to inventory every resource across all regions. The forgotten test environments will shock you.
Are we paying retail for production workloads? Savings Plans can reduce costs up to 75% when properly aligned with usage patterns.
Where is our data living and why? Most storage costs can be cut 40-60% through proper lifecycle management and tiering.
The manufacturing client now runs a more robust, secure, and performant AWS environment for $200,000 less per year. They didn’t sacrifice capability; they eliminated waste.
The question isn’t whether your AWS environment has waste. The question is how much waste you’re willing to tolerate before you do something about it.
