AWS Cost Optimization

Apply practical FinOps controls without sacrificing reliability.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Monthly AWS cost spikes unexpectedly

• Preparing cost reviews with engineering and finance

• Rightsizing EC2, RDS, and EKS workloads

• Choosing Savings Plans or Reserved Instances

Cost Review Workflow

• Tag resources by team, service, and environment.

• Use Cost Explorer and CUR to identify top spend drivers.

• Rightsize underutilized compute and storage.

• Apply commitment discounts for stable baseline usage.

• Set budgets, anomaly alerts, and KPI reporting.

High-Impact Actions

• Move bursty non-prod compute to Spot where safe.

• Configure S3 lifecycle rules for infrequent access and archive tiers.

• Reduce NAT Gateway and inter-AZ data transfer surprises.

• Schedule dev/test shutdown windows outside business hours.

• Tune log retention (CloudWatch, OpenSearch) to policy requirements.

Useful Commands

Cost Explorer rightsizing recommendations (example)

aws ce get-rightsizing-recommendation
--service "AmazonEC2"
--configuration file://rightsizing-config.json

List unattached EBS volumes

aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters Name=status,Values=available

Retrieve budget alerts

aws budgets describe-budgets --account-id 123456789012

Related Skills

• aws-ec2 - EC2 operations and sizing

• aws-s3 - S3 storage and lifecycle controls

• terraform-aws - Codifying cost guardrails