AWS FinOps Cost Optimizer
Line-by-line cloud cost audit that cut $40,920/year
The Problem
The client AWS bill was $6,400 per month for a mid-sized SaaS platform. Contributing factors included over-provisioned EC2 instances in ap-southeast-1 instead of us-east-1, three NAT Gateways routing S3 and DynamoDB traffic across public endpoints at $0.045/GB, absence of a CDN forcing all API responses through the ALB, an idle db.r5.xlarge RDS instance running overnight, and orphaned storage (three unattached 500GB EBS volumes and two unused Elastic IPs).
The Approach
I ran a line-by-line audit across six cost centers. Replaced NAT Gateways with VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB ($0 instead of $450/mo). Right-sized EC2 compute from m5.2xlarge to m6i.large using CloudWatch historical utilization data, locking in 1-year Savings Plans. Migrated RDS to Aurora Serverless v2 so it scales to 0.5 ACU at night. Added CloudFront CDN caching with a 73% cache hit ratio and purged all orphaned resources.
The Result
Monthly spend dropped from $6,400 to $2,990 (a fifty-three percent reduction), saving $40,920 annually. Aurora Serverless alone saved $180 per month by scaling down to 0.5 ACU during off-peak hours.
Try It Yourself
Interact with the simulation below. This replicates the actual engineering scenario described above.