Why CloudWatch Metrics Alone Don't Solve Right-Sizing
CPU utilization is necessary but not sufficient. Here is what a complete right-sizing signal requires...
Anatomy of a Cloud Bill Spike: Three Root Causes We See Repeatedly
Not every billing surprise is a misconfigured NAT Gateway. Here are the three patterns that account for most unexpected spikes...
The Problem with AWS Compute Optimizer
Compute Optimizer is useful for single-account scans. It is less useful when the bottleneck is cross-account attribution and approval workflow...
Non-Production Scheduling: A Practitioner's Guide
Staging and dev environments are the easiest cloud spend to reduce — and the one area most teams leave unscheduled. Here is the full approach...
Tag Inference: When Your Cost Explorer Data Has Gaps
73% of AWS accounts we have analyzed have tagging coverage below 60%. Here is how to attribute spend when the tags are not there...
FinOps vs. Platform Engineering: Who Actually Owns Cloud Cost?
The organizational question matters more than the tooling choice. Most cloud waste survives because neither team has clear ownership of the decision...
ElastiCache Cost: What We Found Across 50 Accounts
Cache clusters from deprecated features, read replicas nobody queries, and Multi-AZ configurations on caches that do not need them. The pattern is consistent...
How to Build a 90-Day Utilization Baseline from CloudWatch
Right-sizing without a baseline is guesswork. Here is the exact approach: which metrics to pull, how to segment by day-of-week, and where single-day spikes distort the picture...
Reserved Instances vs. Savings Plans: An Honest Comparison
AWS documentation favors Savings Plans for flexibility, but the flexibility comes with trade-offs in coverage. Here is when each makes sense given your workload shape...
What We Learned From Our First 50 Customer Accounts
After connecting 50 engineering teams, some patterns are consistent. Non-production spend, forgotten snapshots, and over-sized RDS — three categories account for 61% of the savings we find...
Kubernetes Cost Visibility: The Namespace Problem
AWS charges for the node, not the pod. Attributing that node cost to the right team requires Kubernetes metrics and AWS billing data to meet in the same place...
RDS Cost: The Three Configurations Nobody Reviews
Multi-AZ on a database that runs nightly batch jobs. Read replicas with zero connections. Storage auto-scaling that never scales back down. These three patterns survive every cost review...