The Challenge
Our client had grown quickly, and their cloud infrastructure had grown along with it, without any financial governance behind it. Development teams had full autonomy to provision resources but no visibility into costs, and no one was accountable for them. Cloud spend ran away and started eating into a disproportionate share of revenue.
Our Approach
Cost Visibility & Tagging
We implemented a comprehensive tagging strategy and cost allocation model that attributed every dollar of cloud spend to specific teams, products, and environments.
Optimization Execution
We conducted a systematic review of all cloud resources, identifying rightsizing opportunities, eliminating unused resources, and implementing automated scheduling for non-production environments.
Reserved Capacity Strategy
Based on steady-state usage analysis, we designed and implemented a reserved instance and savings plan strategy that locked in significant discounts without overcommitting.
FinOps Culture
We established a FinOps practice with cross-functional representation, regular cost reviews, team-level budgets, and engineering-friendly dashboards that made cost a first-class metric.
The Results
Within six months, cloud costs were cut in half, from $8M to $4M annually, while the business kept growing. More importantly, the FinOps practices we established keep cost optimization running as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time project.