Cloud Waste: The $17B Problem Hiding in Your AWS Bill

AWS customers waste 30% of spend on average. Here is what to look for:

## The Top 10 AWS Waste Sources

**1. Unattached EBS Volumes** ($$$)
- Volumes detached from terminated instances
- Still incurring storage costs
- Typical finding: 200-500 volumes, $5-15K monthly

**2. Old Snapshots** ($$)
- Backups from 2+ years ago
- Never used for restore
- Accumulating costs monthly

**3. Idle Load Balancers** ($$)
- Load balancers with zero traffic
- $20-50/month each
- Often 10-30 idle LBs found

**4. Over-Provisioned RDS** ($$$)
- Database instances sized for peak, running 24/7
- CPU utilization <20%
- Downsize and use reserved instances

**5. Non-Production Running 24/7** ($$$$)
- Dev/test/staging environments
- Used 40 hours/week, billed 168 hours
- 75% waste opportunity

**6. Unoptimized S3 Storage** ($$)
- All data in S3 Standard
- 80% accessed <1 time per month
- Move to Glacier or Intelligent-Tiering

**7. Elastic IPs Not Attached** ($)
- IP addresses reserved but unused
- Small per-IP cost but adds up
- Release unused IPs

**8. NAT Gateways** ($$)
- Expensive for data transfer
- Often multiple NAT Gateways when one sufficient
- Consolidate and optimize

**9. Data Transfer Costs** ($$$)
- Inter-region transfer
- Egress to internet
- Optimize architecture to minimize transfer

**10. No Reserved Instances / Savings Plans** ($$$$)
- Paying on-demand for steady workloads
- Missing 40-60% discounts
- Commit to reserved capacity

## The 7-Day AWS Waste Audit

**Day 1: Compute Waste**
- Underutilized EC2 instances (<40% CPU)
- Stopped instances still incurring EBS costs
- Old instance types (upgrade to current generation)

**Day 2: Storage Waste**
- Unattached EBS volumes
- Snapshots older than retention policy
- S3 storage class optimization

**Day 3: Database Waste**
- Over-provisioned RDS instances
- Idle database instances
- Missing reserved instance purchases

**Day 4: Network Waste**
- Idle load balancers
- Elastic IPs not attached
- NAT Gateway consolidation

**Day 5: Scheduling Opportunities**
- Identify non-production environments
- Calculate 24/7 vs. business hours cost
- Implement automated shutdown

**Day 6: Reserved Capacity**
- Analyze steady-state workload
- Calculate reserved instance savings
- Purchase 1-year commitments

**Day 7: Build Optimization Roadmap**
- Prioritize by savings opportunity
- Create implementation plan
- Set up ongoing monitoring

## Tools to Automate This

- AWS Cost Explorer (basic analysis)
- AWS Trusted Advisor (recommendations)
- CloudHealth / CloudCheckr (advanced FinOps)
- Custom Lambda functions (automated cleanup)

## Real Results

**SaaS Company** ($780K monthly AWS spend):
- Found $187K monthly waste (24%)
- Implemented fixes in 30 days
- Ongoing savings: $2.2M annually

**E-commerce Company** ($420K monthly):
- Scheduled non-prod shutdown: $68K/month saved
- RDS rightsizing: $32K/month saved
- Reserved instances: $89K/month saved
- Total: $189K monthly ($2.3M annually)

The waste is there. You just have to look for it.