AWS Infrastructure Audit

The Challenge

A successful mid-stage startup had rapidly scaled their infrastructure on AWS using Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and RDS. However, their monthly AWS bill had grown far faster than their user base, reaching an alarming rate that was impacting the company's runway.

The Solution

We conducted a deep, forensic audit of their AWS usage, infrastructure configurations, and deployment pipelines.

Resource Right-Sizing

The initial investigation revealed massive over-provisioning. Development and staging environments were running on instances identical to production, and production clusters were scaled for peak holiday traffic 24/7. We implemented aggressive right-sizing and introduced Karpenter to automatically adjust cluster compute capacity based on actual pod requirements.

Spot Instances & Reserved Capacity

For stateless, fault-tolerant background workers, we transitioned the workloads to AWS Spot Instances, achieving a ~70% discount on compute costs. For baseline database and core application loads, we purchased Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs), locking in significant long-term discounts.

Idle Resource Cleanup

We identified and terminated dozens of unattached EBS volumes, obsolete snapshot backups, and idle load balancers that had been forgotten over years of rapid development.

The Results

• $15,000 Monthly Savings: The immediate changes reduced the monthly AWS bill by $15k, representing a 35% overall reduction.
• Automated Cost Control: We implemented automated tagging and cost-anomaly alerts to prevent future billing spikes.
• Improved Efficiency: The infrastructure was optimized to scale dynamically, meaning the company only pays for what it actually uses.