Cloud Cost Optimization — FinOps Assessment & Automation

OVERVIEW

Cloud costs compound invisibly. A test environment nobody shut down. EC2 instances sized for peak load that runs 2 hours a month. Reserved instances purchased for architecture that changed.

The average AWS account has 35% waste hiding in plain sight. Most organizations cannot even attribute costs to the teams and products driving them.

ZSoftly runs a complete FinOps assessment of your AWS environment, eliminates waste, implements tagging, optimizes commitments, and deploys automated controls to prevent future overruns.

WHAT WE DELIVER

Cost Audit (Weeks 1-2)

• Complete spend analysis across all AWS accounts and linked accounts
• Resource inventory with utilization metrics (EC2, RDS, ECS, Lambda, S3, data transfer)
• Idle resource identification: stopped instances, unattached volumes, unused load balancers
• Commitment coverage analysis: Reserved Instances and Savings Plans vs. actual usage
• Data transfer cost mapping (often 15-25% of total bill, frequently overlooked)

Tagging and Attribution (Weeks 3-4)

• Tagging strategy design: Team, Product, Environment, CostCenter, Owner
• Automated tag enforcement via AWS Config rules and SCPs in AWS Organizations
• Cost allocation reports by team, product, and environment in AWS Cost Explorer
• Showback reports delivered to engineering leads monthly

Waste Elimination (Weeks 5-6)

• Rightsizing recommendations with implementation: EC2, RDS, ElastiCache
• Idle resource cleanup with owner notification workflow
• S3 lifecycle policy implementation: Intelligent-Tiering for infrequently accessed data
• EBS volume audit: delete unattached, snapshot-only for rarely accessed
• NAT Gateway optimization: consolidation where appropriate

Commitment Optimization

• Reserved Instance and Savings Plan analysis across all instance families
• Exchange recommendations for better-fit reservations
• 1-year vs. 3-year commitment recommendation based on workload stability
• Spot Instance opportunity analysis for fault-tolerant workloads

Automated Controls

• AWS Budgets with alert thresholds at 80% and 100% of monthly target
• Cost anomaly detection with Slack or email notifications
• Weekly cost digest delivered to engineering and finance leads
• Monthly rightsizing report with automated recommendation tracking

ENGAGEMENT TIMELINE

Week 1-2: Cost audit. We analyze every resource across all accounts. Where does money go? What runs idle? What is oversized? You see the complete picture in a prioritized report.

Week 3-4: Tagging and attribution. Tagging strategy deployed. Every resource maps to a team, product, and environment. Finance gets answers to questions they have been asking for months.

Week 5-6: Waste elimination. Quick wins implemented first. Idle resources removed with owner sign-off. Rightsizing applied to top 20 highest-cost instances.

Week 7-8: Automation and handoff. Budget alerts live. Anomaly detection active. Monthly reporting cadence established. Team trained on AWS Cost Explorer. 30-day support begins.

RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT

• Cost reduction from waste: 30-50%
• Additional savings from commitment optimization: 20-40%
• Cost attribution accuracy: improved from near-zero to over 80%
• First-year ROI: 10-20x engagement cost from identified savings

WHO THIS IS FOR

• Companies with AWS bills over $10,000 per month
• Organizations where cloud costs surprise leadership quarterly
• Teams that cannot attribute costs to specific products or teams
• Engineering orgs where commitments were made for architecture that has changed

WHAT IS INCLUDED

Fixed-scope 8-week engagement. Tagging strategy documentation. Terraform for AWS Config rules and tagging enforcement. Cost allocation report templates. Operations runbook for ongoing FinOps practice. 30-day post-engagement support