Cloud Cost Optimization and FinOps

The problem this solves

Cloud bills grow by accumulation: environments nobody decommissioned, instances sized for a peak that never returns, managed services running at the wrong tier. Finance sees the number rise; engineering lacks the time to trace it. The result is a monthly cost that nobody can fully explain.

What the engagement looks like

A cost review starts with attribution — mapping spend to services, teams, and environments — because you cannot cut what you cannot assign. From there the levers are well known: right-sizing, spot and reserved capacity, storage lifecycle policies, and removing what nothing depends on. The discipline is in verifying each change against reliability requirements before applying it, and encoding the result in Terraform so it does not drift back.

In freelance engagements on AWS and Azure this approach reduced monthly cloud spend by 25%, partly through right-sizing and cleanup, partly through migrating workloads to services with a better cost profile (ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3).

Typical deliverables

• Cost attribution report: where the money goes, by service and environment.
• Prioritized savings plan with estimated impact and risk per item.
• Implementation of the agreed changes, in code.
• Tagging and budget-alert baseline so costs stay visible after the engagement.

Who this is for

CTOs and finance-adjacent engineering leaders who need the cloud bill explained and reduced with evidence, not a dashboard subscription. FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP).