I audited an AWS account last year. (screenshots attached. 90% reduction !!)
Monthly bill peak : ~$5,600
Nobody could explain why.
So I opened Cost Explorer. Also, to remove confusion I always make sure I cancel savings plans or reserved instances. they are just confusing and lower the bill in an artificial way. It’s another way of saying “Instead of fixing my amazon cost I will prepay amazon years in advance to kind-of-artifically-fix my bill” and let them continue milking my credit card. Moo. 🐮
What was actually happening
Not traffic. Super funny. This happens all the time. some wise guy decided the company will manage like twitter so everything is oversized. When I look back 1 year they peak at 5 reqs per second. In other words – you can run the whole app in iPhone 7 and still have room for growth 🤣
Leftovers. its exactly the same as starting a subscription for something you dont need and find after 2 years your credit card is bleeding.
- Oversized RDS instance running far below capacity
- 200GB database volume for a ~10GB database
- Multiple instances with almost no traffic
- Years of forgotten S3 backups
- Large “EC2-Other” charges nobody ever checked
After cleanup:
- No rewrite
- No downtime
- No feature changes
New bill: ~$700/month
~90% reduction
- No Spot instances
- No Savings Plans
- No long-term commitments
>>>>Just removing waste.
What I keep seeing
Cloud costs rarely explode.
They accumulate.
A bigger instance “temporarily”
A staging server nobody deletes
Backups never expire
Storage never resized
After a few years nobody remembers what anything is for.
Most infra problems are not scaling problems.
They are ownership problems.
If your AWS bill doesn’t match your traffic, it’s usually fixable.
book a call with me here https://lnkd.in/dBZ8xjEa