AWS FinOps Cost Optimizer
Line-by-line cloud cost audit that cut $40,920/year
The Problem
Client's AWS bill was $6,400/mo for a mid-size SaaS platform. Over-provisioned EC2 instances running in the wrong region (ap-southeast-1 instead of us-east-1), 3 NAT Gateways routing S3 and DynamoDB traffic through public internet at $0.045/GB, no CDN so every API response served directly from ALB, RDS running a db.r5.xlarge at full capacity 24/7 even at 3 AM, and orphaned resources accumulating — 3 unattached 500GB EBS volumes, 2 floating Elastic IPs, and a dead NAT Gateway from a deleted VPC.
The Approach
I ran a line-by-line audit of 6 cost centers. Replaced NAT Gateways with VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3/DynamoDB — $0 instead of $450/mo. Right-sized EC2 from m5.2xlarge to m6i.large using CloudWatch CPU/memory data, then locked in 1-year Savings Plans. Migrated RDS to Aurora Serverless v2 so it auto-scales to near-zero at night. Added CloudFront CDN with 73% cache hit ratio. Cleaned up all orphaned resources. Downgraded support plan from Business to Developer.
The Result
Monthly bill dropped from $6,400 to $2,990 — a 53% reduction, saving $40,920/year. Aurora Serverless alone saved $180/mo by scaling to 0.5 ACU during off-peak hours.
Try It Yourself
Interact with the simulation below. This replicates the actual engineering scenario described above.