5 proven strategies to uncover cost optimization opportunities in your cloud spend
2025 Flexera State of the Cloud Report revealed that 84% of enterprises rank managing cloud costs as their top cloud challenge, and AWS highlights that common culprits like idle resources and overprovisioned infrastructure quietly inflate monthly bills.
So, AWS has shared various resources with cloud cost optimization strategies that can help both engineering and FinOps teams reduce costs without sacrificing performance.
As an AWS Select Tier Partner, we've helped organizations, from startups to enterprise clients, optimize their cloud infrastructure costs for maximum savings. This article distills 5 proven strategies that have helped us achieve that.
We've noticed teams often overlook the fundamentals while chasing complex optimization strategies. AWS itself identifies over-provisioned resources as the primary cost optimization challenge. This resonates with what we see daily companies spinning large instances "just to be safe" or leaving resources running in development environments that mirror production scale.
To help you make smarter decisions, AWS has built sophisticated tools like AWS Compute Optimizer that use machine learning to analyze actual utilization patterns. The Cost Optimization Hub now automatically identifies orphaned resources, those EBS volumes attached to nothing, unused Elastic IPs, and idle load balancers that quietly accumulate charges month after month.
But the most important pattern we consistently observe is that cost optimization happens when you build cost awareness into your deployment processes, so that inefficiencies don't compound over time.
The most successful cost reductions we've implemented start with visibility, not constraints.
Implement Performance-Based Resource Scaling: Define clear performance thresholds and automatically scale resources based on actual demand. With the right monitoring and autoscaling in place, you can reduce idle capacity without compromising availability.
Eliminate Shadow IT Infrastructure Waste: Conduct quarterly infrastructure audits to identify abandoned projects and forgotten resources. Establish approval workflows for new resource provisioning.
Modernize Your Storage Choices: Storage is often the silent cost accumulator. Moving to next-gen options like gp3 (instead of gp2) or reviewing your S3 lifecycle policies can reduce costs and improve performance.
Use Flexible Compute Capacity Where Resilience isn’t Critical: For workloads like test suites, staging environments, or batch processing, consider Spot Instances or Graviton-based options. These offer significant cost reductions and are well-suited for non-production environments where brief interruptions are acceptable.
Optimize Business Continuity Costs: Review backup and disaster recovery requirements with stakeholders. Many organizations maintain enterprise-grade retention policies for non-critical systems.
One of the best examples of strategic AWS cost optimization at scale comes from Canva. As their user base soared to over 160 million monthly active users, their infrastructure team partnered with AWS to reduce compute costs without compromising innovation speed or reliability.
Over a two-year period, Canva achieved a 46% reduction in compute costs by combining multiple AWS purchase models (Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans) based on workload criticality.
Beyond pricing models, Canva implemented performance-based auto scaling for containerized workloads using Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling. They also empowered individual product teams with cost visibility using AWS tools like Compute Optimizer and Cloud Financial Management dashboards.
This democratization of cost data helped developers understand how their choices impacted both cost and user experience.
Here’s a snapshot of what they achieved with these strategies:
These foundational strategies will get you started, but mastering AWS cost optimization requires understanding the full ecosystem of tools, techniques, and best practices.
We've compiled everything - including advanced strategies, implementation of playbooks, and real-world case studies - into a comprehensive guide that's helped teams achieve 30-50% cost reductions.
What you'll get:
AWS Cost Optimization Checklist
How to Fine-tune the AWS Spend for Your Industry
Advanced optimization techniques not covered here
Clever Approaches to AWS Cloud Cost Optimization
Step-by-step implementation guides for each strategy
The difference between successful and unsuccessful cost optimization isn't knowing what to do. It takes thorough implementation expertise to systematically maintain it over time.
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