Cloud Cost Optimization

Most organisations are overspending on AWS. Not because they are doing anything deliberately wasteful, but because cost optimisation rarely gets the same attention as feature delivery. I help teams reduce their cloud spend without sacrificing the performance or reliability their users depend on.

The goal is not to cut costs blindly. It is to make every pound of infrastructure spend intentional and accountable.

What's involved

• Spend analysis: Deep dive into your AWS bill to identify where money is going and why
• Right-sizing: Assess compute, database and storage resources against actual utilisation patterns to eliminate over-provisioning
• Architecture-level recommendations: Identify structural changes that reduce cost at the design level, not just the resource level
• Waste identification: Find and eliminate orphaned resources, unused allocations and forgotten experiments
• FinOps practices: Establish ongoing cost visibility, tagging standards, budgets and alerting so optimisation becomes a habit rather than a project

Common wins

In my experience, the biggest savings typically come from a few recurring patterns:

• Always-on development environments: Non-production infrastructure running 24/7 when it is only needed during business hours
• Runaway logging and storage costs: Unbounded log retention, uncompressed S3 storage and missing lifecycle policies
• Over-provisioned EC2 and RDS instances: Running production on instance sizes chosen during initial setup and never revisited
• Misaligned savings plans: Commitments that do not match actual usage patterns or have expired without review

Who this is for

• Teams whose AWS bill has grown faster than their revenue: Bringing spend back in line with business value
• Engineering leaders preparing for budget reviews: Concrete, prioritised recommendations with estimated savings
• Companies without dedicated FinOps capacity: Practical cost governance without hiring a full-time team
• Organisations post-migration: Cleaning up the cost profile after a lift-and-shift to AWS

How engagements work

I start with a cost audit: typically a 2-3 week exercise that produces a prioritised list of recommendations with estimated savings and implementation effort for each. From there, I can support your team through implementation or hand off the recommendations with detailed guidance. Quick wins are flagged early so you start saving before the full audit completes.

Based in London, I work hybrid locally or remotely with teams across UTC-4 to UTC+4 timezones.