Cutting Cloud Costs: How I Reduced $2,000 From Monthly Spend

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate as a cloud engineer is that running workloads in the cloud isn’t just about performance and scalability, it’s also about being cost-efficient. It’s easy to spin up resources on AWS, but if you’re not intentional, costs can spiral out of control, even when the system isn’t in production.

At a previous company, I noticed that our monthly AWS bill was reaching close to $7,000. What made it worse was that this wasn’t even for a production environment, it was mostly pre-production and testing workloads. Paying that much every month for infrastructure that wasn’t driving revenue simply didn’t make sense. So, I took it upon myself to do a thorough assessment of our cloud environment.

The first thing that stood out was compute. We were running multiple instances that were far bigger than they needed to be. Utilization levels were low, yet we were paying premium prices for capacity that wasn’t being used. By analyzing usage patterns and metrics, I was able to rightsize our compute. That meant scaling down to smaller instance types and ensuring workloads were only consuming what they actually needed. On top of that, I put auto scaling policies in place so that resources would only scale up when demand required it. Just by making these adjustments, we saved more than $400 every month.

But the bigger opportunity for savings came from the database layer. Our RDS instances were running on unnecessarily high-tier configurations. For test and development environments, that was overkill. After carefully benchmarking workloads, I downgraded the database instances to more appropriate sizes, optimized storage, and adjusted the way we handled snapshots and backups. These changes alone cut more than $1,200 from the monthly bill.

Beyond the technical adjustments, I also pushed for a culture of visibility and accountability around cloud spend. I set up cost reports, budgets, and alerts so that the team could see where money was going. This made a huge difference because instead of reacting to a surprise bill at the end of the month, we could make proactive decisions in real time.

In just one month, the results were clear: our monthly AWS bill dropped from $7,000 to $5,000. That’s a $2,000 reduction, translating into $24,000 saved annually, all while maintaining the same level of performance and reliability. It wasn’t magic, just careful observation, optimization, and a willingness to rethink how resources were being used.

This experience taught me something important: cost optimization isn’t just a technical task, it’s a mindset. It requires both the right tools and a culture of awareness. And when done right, it creates real financial impact for businesses.

If your company is struggling with high cloud costs, you don’t have to accept it as the norm. At Cloud Consulting Group (CCG), we specialize in helping organizations optimize, scale, and save on their cloud infrastructure. Reach out today, and let’s make your cloud not only powerful, but cost-efficient too.