Case Study

Cloud Cost Optimization & Infra Cleanup

Drastically reducing cloud spend through a systematic FinOps audit, infrastructure rightsizing, and implementation of automated cost-saving policies.

Role
Fractional CTO
Timeline
2 Months
Industry
General Tech / SaaS
Focus
AWS Cost Explorer

Problem Breakdown

A mid-sized SaaS company saw their AWS bill spike to $50k/month without an equivalent growth in traffic, with no visibility into which services were driving the cost.

Architecture Decisions

  • /Tag-based cost allocation for departmental accountability
  • /Automated instance rightsizing based on CloudWatch metrics
  • /Migration to AWS Graviton (ARM) for better price-performance

Trade-offs

  • ¬Time required for detailed audit vs immediate cost savings
  • ¬Risk of under-provisioning during extreme peaks requiring careful buffer
  • ¬One-time engineering effort to move legacy workloads to ARM

Key Outcomes

  • Achieved an immediate 40% reduction in monthly AWS bill.
  • Improved application performance by 15% via Graviton and modern instance types.
  • Implemented automated tagging and cost enforcement policies.
  • Reduced waste by cleaning up 200+ unused volumes and snapshots.
AWS Cost ExplorerCloudWatchTerraformPythonFinOps

Have a similar system challenge?

I specialize in solving high-stakes technical problems for founders. Let's build something scalable together.

Book a technical discovery call 

Typically respond within 24 hours