work / case
AWS Estate Ownership + FinOps
Primary owner of a four-account production AWS estate, where a commitment and right-sizing strategy cut cloud spend by ~30% and holds it down year after year.
Problem
The production AWS estate spanned four accounts and grew organically as products shipped — instances over-provisioned for peak load that never came, orphaned volumes and snapshots, mismatched EBS types, and zero commitment coverage on a workload that ran 24/7. Everything was billed on-demand, nothing was tagged for accountability, and no one owned the bill. Spend climbed every month with no one able to say which line items were load-bearing and which were waste.
Approach
Took sole ownership of the estate and treated cost as an engineering problem, not a procurement one.
- Mapped the spend to running workloads — EC2, EKS, RDS, OpenSearch, S3, EFS — and separated steady-state baseline from genuinely elastic demand.
- Right-sized over-provisioned compute and database instances against real utilisation rather than worst-case guesses.
- Reorganised EBS: matched volume types to access patterns and reclaimed orphaned volumes and stale snapshots.
- Built a commitment strategy: layered Savings Plans and Reserved Instances over the verified 24/7 baseline, keeping on-demand only for the part of the load that actually flexed — capturing the discount without over-committing.
- Cleaned up waste: terminated idle and duplicated resources and put a recurring review cadence in place so savings did not erode back.
Running the entire estate as one engineer — alongside the EKS, networking, and security work it hosts (ACM, Route 53, WAF, KMS, SES, Firehose) — kept cost decisions grounded in how the systems actually run. Backed by AWS Solutions Architect — Professional (SAP-C02).
Outcome
- ~30% reduction in the first optimisation round, with no impact to availability or performance.
- ~10% recurring savings delivered in one to two follow-up reviews each year, so the gains compound rather than drift back to baseline.
- Became the cost-decision authority for the estate — management consults on spend before commitments are made.
- A four-account estate that stays right-sized, predictable, and accountable instead of quietly growing.