How One Organization Cut AWS Costs by 39% in 12 Weeks

This article describes how a SaaS organization cut AWS costs by 39% in 12 weeks while preparing for 10x growth using a phased optimization approach.

• Prioritized optimizations using effort-versus-impact scoring, combining AWS Cost Optimization Hub recommendations with custom architectural assessments
• Consolidated 150+ Network Load Balancers into 5 Application Load Balancers, saving $3,400/month with zero downtime
• Migrated 200+ EBS gp2 volumes to gp3 and implemented S3 Gateway endpoints, eliminating $2,400/month in NAT gateway charges
• Right-sized compute instances from m5.4xlarge to r6a.2xlarge and migrated workloads to AWS Graviton2 for additional savings
• Implemented S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Karpenter for automated node lifecycle management
• Sustained savings through service control policies restricting instance families and preventing gp2 volume creation

The phased methodology sequences changes by risk and dependency, allowing each phase to fund and reduce risk for the next, delivering $13,700 monthly savings (39% reduction) with projected $1.64M annual savings at 10x scale.