In the world of cloud infrastructure, “business as usual” is often synonymous with “paying too much.” Many teams assume that high AWS bills are simply the price of scaling. However, as our recent FinOps audits have proven, massive savings don’t require sacrificing performance – they just require a little bit of tactical precision.
By identifying misconfigurations and optimizing schedules, we recently unlocked nearly $140,000 in annual recurring savings for our clients. Here is exactly how we did it.
1. The Power of “When” (AWS Glue & CloudWatch)
The Fix: Reduced Glue job frequency from 7 days a week to 2 days. The Result: 72% Savings
Sometimes, the simplest solution is the most effective. By evaluating the actual business need for data freshness, we realized daily processing was overkill. Reducing the cadence not only slashed Glue costs but had a massive ripple effect on CloudWatch logging fees.
- Glue Savings: $6.5K/year
- CloudWatch Savings: $7K/year
- Total Impact: $13.5K/year added back to the bottom line.
2. The Great EFS Cleanout
The Fix: Deleted redundant and obsolete data (95% of total storage). The Result: 87% Savings
Elastic File System (EFS) is incredibly convenient, but it’s easy to treat it like an attic where you store junk forever. We performed a deep dive into usage patterns and purged unnecessary data that was sitting idle.
- Total Impact: $32K/year saved with zero impact on production.
3. Upgrading for Efficiency (Redshift)
The Fix: Upgraded from DC2 to RA3 nodes. The Result: 92% Savings on Concurrency Scaling
By moving to the RA3 architecture, we gained the ability to scale and pay for managed storage and compute independently. This architectural shift caused the expensive “Concurrency Scaling” hits to drop off a cliff.
- Total Impact: $20K/year saved by simply using the right tool for the job.
4. S3 Lifecycle Management
The Fix: Adjusted retention policies and purged old object versions. The Result: 57% Savings
S3 is cheap – until it isn’t. Old versions of objects and “broken” multi-part uploads can accumulate like digital dust. By implementing a strict lifecycle fix, we ensured the client was only paying for the data they actually needed.
- Total Impact: $38K/year in recovered revenue.
5. Squashing the “Self-Healing” Loop (EKS & NAT Gateway)
The Fix: Corrected a cluster misconfiguration triggering unnecessary routing. The Result: 87% Savings
This was a classic “ghost in the machine” scenario. A misconfigured EKS cluster was stuck in a self-healing loop, constantly routing traffic through a NAT Gateway. It wasn’t broken enough to trigger a production outage, but it was expensive enough to drain the budget.
- Total Impact: $36K/year saved by fixing one configuration line.
The Bottom Line: $139,500 Saved
None of these changes damaged production. None of them required a total infrastructure rewrite. They were the result of diligent monitoring and a FinOps mindset that treats cloud waste as a bug.
Is your AWS bill higher than it should be?
Most companies are sitting on thousands of dollars in “low-hanging fruit” savings just like these. Don’t let your budget leak away into mismanaged clusters and obsolete storage.
Ready to see how much you can save? Reach out to our team today for a FinOps audit, and let’s start adding that revenue back to your balance sheet.
