Reducing AWS Cloud Costs by 60%

The client handed us their AWS bill. It was $20k/month. They had 20 users. Something was wrong.

The Investigation

We used CloudHealth and AWS Cost Explorer to dig in.

1. The Walking Dead (Zombies)

We found 40 EC2 instances running t2.large. They had CPU utilization of 0.1% for the last 6 months. Someone launched them for a “test” and forgot to terminate them. Action: Terminated. Saving: $4k/month.

2. Orphaned EBS Volumes

When you terminate an EC2 instance, the hard drive (EBS volume) often sticks around “just in case.” They had 5TB of unattached storage. Action: Snapshot and Delete. Saving: $500/month.

3. S3 Lifecycle Policies

They were storing terabytes of logs from 2019 in “S3 Standard” (expensive hot storage). Action: Moved to “S3 Glacier Deep Archive”. Saving: $2k/month.

4. Spot Instances

For their CI/CD workers (which don’t need 100% uptime), we switched to Spot Instances. Saving: 70% on compute costs.

Conclusion

The final bill was $8k/month. We saved them $144,000 a year just by cleaning up. Cloud costs are silent killers. Regular audits are non-negotiable.