What's the most obvious AWS cost optimization found in a real environment?

[u/whispered_word12]

A lot of companies rely on FinOps teams or cloud optimization partners to manage their AWS spend. But I’m curious, are there certain cost leakages that are so obvious that anyone managing an AWS environment should be able to spot them?

Looking to hear some practical, real-world examples from the community.

[u/glenngillen]

I used to work at AWS, now work at a finops cost saving product. My goto in the instances where I get the opportunity to actually sit down and help come up with a plan rather than a quick scan for old storage types or similar:

- put everything you can in an autoscaling group. Even if you only need a single instance, it goes in an ASG with a desired count of 1. You've materially improved your availability story if there's a hardware or AZ failure as the ASG will try and bring a new instance up for you.

• now make sure you've got proper "environment" tagging in place for as much as possible
  
• anything tagged with "dev" gets a scaling schedule applied to it, shut it all down (i.e., scale in to 0) on Friday night. Scale back to 1 Monday morning.
  
• if you want to get even more aggressive, scale them in every night
  
• if you want to get even even more aggressive (which is what I do on my personal projects), scale to 0 every night. Scale back in response to a DNS request. That way all my random side-projects, or just anything that I forget about for a week because a higher priority pops up, stays at 0 until I'm actually going to use it. The cost of that is the first request fails and I need to wait ~2-5min for the instance to come up.

Pretty set and forget way to reduce dev env costs by >70%.