The Cloud Cost Problem
According to Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud Report, organisations waste 32% of their cloud spend. The FinOps Foundation reports cloud cost management is now the top cloud initiative for 82% of organisations.
Quick Wins: Save 20-30% This Month
1. Eliminate Unused Resources
Unattached EBS volumes (EUR 8/month per 100GB), idle load balancers (EUR 20/month each), unassociated Elastic IPs (EUR 3.60/month each), old snapshots (EUR 0.05/GB/month). Use AWS Cost Explorer's Rightsizing Recommendations and Trusted Advisor.
2. Right-Size Instances
AWS Compute Optimizer analyses actual utilisation. In our experience, 60-70% of EC2 instances are over-provisioned by at least one size. Start with non-production environments.
3. Schedule Non-Production Environments
Dev/staging running 24/7 wastes 65-75% of compute cost. Use AWS Instance Scheduler, custom Lambda functions, or Terraform destroy/apply for ephemeral environments.
4. Use Spot Instances
60-90% discounts for fault-tolerant workloads: CI/CD agents, batch processing, dev environments, Kubernetes worker nodes (via Karpenter).
Medium-Term: Commitment Discounts (30-60%)
| Type | 1-Year | 3-Year | Flexibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 RI (Standard) | 30-40% | 55-60% | Fixed type/region |
| Compute Savings Plans | 20-30% | 45-55% | Any type, any region, includes Fargate/Lambda |
| EC2 Instance Savings Plans | 30-40% | 50-60% | Any size in family, fixed region |
Our recommendation: Compute Savings Plans for baseline (most flexible). Avoid 3-year unless very stable. RDS Reserved Instances are usually safe (databases rarely change type).
Long-Term: Building a FinOps Practice
1. Cost Allocation Tagging
Mandatory tags: Environment, Team, Service, CostCenter. Enforce with AWS SCPs or Terraform validation.
2. Cost Anomaly Detection
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (free) catches unusual spending before bill shock. Alert on daily cost exceeding 150% of trailing 7-day average.
3. Team-Level Cost Dashboards
Tools: AWS Cost Explorer (free), Kubecost (K8s cost allocation), Infracost (Terraform cost in PRs), CloudHealth (enterprise multi-cloud).
4. Cost Governance in CI/CD
Infracost in PR reviews shows monthly cost impact. Budget alerts per team via AWS Budgets. Automated cleanup of expired temporary resources.
FinOps Maturity Model
- Crawl (2-4 weeks) — Visibility. See what you spend and who spends it.
- Walk (2-4 months) — Active optimisation. Right-sizing, scheduling, commitments. Where 70-80% of savings materialise.
- Run (6-12 months) — Automated, embedded in CI/CD, continuously monitored.
Start with our AWS cost reduction guide. For structured FinOps implementation, our cloud architecture team can conduct a cost audit within two weeks. Contact us for a free initial assessment.
