01Introduction
$4.8M AWS Bill with No FinOps Practice
02Problem Statement
- SaaS company: $4.8M/year AWS spend growing 35% YoY; no tagging, no RI coverage
- Engineering teams provisioning resources with no cost accountability
- Finance unable to allocate cloud costs to products or business units
- Challenge: cut spend 40% in 6 months without impacting platform performance
- Goal: implement FinOps practice; real-time cost visibility per team
03Proposed Solution
Phase 1
Tagging + Rightsizing + Commitment Coverage Framework
- AWS Cost Explorer + CUR exported to Athena + QuickSight
- Mandatory tagging enforced via AWS Config rules and SCPs in AWS Organizations
- Compute Optimizer recommendations ingested and triaged by service team
- Reserved Instance and Savings Plans coverage analysis per account
- Zombie resource detection: Lambda scans for unattached EBS, idle RDS, old AMIs
Phase 2
Optimization Execution by Category
- EC2 rightsizing: 340 instances downsized; Graviton2 migration for 120 workloads
- RDS: 18 oversized instances rightsized; Aurora Serverless v2 for dev environments
- S3: Intelligent-Tiering enabled on 2.4PB; lifecycle rules for old Glacier archives
- RI/SP: $1.2M in 1-year Savings Plans purchased (80% coverage target achieved)
- Data transfer: CloudFront deployed for 6 origin regions; egress reduced 55%
04Technologies
- AWS
- Cost ExplorerCURCompute OptimizerSavings PlansTrusted Advisor
- Analytics
- Amazon AthenaQuickSight (FinOps dashboards)
- Automation
- AWS Lambda (zombie resource cleanup)Config Rules (tagging enforcement)
- Governance
- AWS Organizations SCPsAWS Budgets with SNS alerts
- Reporting
- Monthly FinOps report to CFO with per-team cost allocation