Many companies see their AWS costs growing month over month without understanding why. Over-provisioned resources, idle instances, lack of commitments (Reserved Instances or Savings Plans), and absence of cost governance are common causes. Without a FinOps practice, waste can represent a material share of the bill.
Who it's for
Companies that want to reduce AWS costs
Engineering, finance, and leadership teams that need to control AWS spending. Ideal for companies with AWS bills above $10K/month that have never done an optimization exercise, or that want to implement a continuous FinOps practice.
FinOps diagnosis
How to turn an AWS bill into an action plan
Baseline required
CUR or Cost Explorer, tags, accounts, environments, owners, commitments, seasonality, and planned changes.
Cost by product, customer, environment, transaction, or workload, not only monthly total.
Separate production from dev/test, logs, data transfer, NAT Gateway, storage, snapshots, and observability.
Quick wins
Idle instances, unattached EBS, old snapshots, Elastic IPs, forgotten environments, and logs without retention.
Storage tiering and data-transfer review before long commitments.
Right-sizing with metrics, safety margin, validation window, and rollback.
Commitment strategy
Savings Plans and RIs only make sense when workload direction, Region, family, and seasonality support the term.
Future modernization can reduce the value of commitments bought too early.
Every recommendation should have owner, risk, estimated savings, rollback condition, and review date.
Recommendation record
How a cost recommendation should be documented
Minimum fields
Current resource, utilization, recommendation, estimated savings, risk, owner, validation window, and rollback.
Impact on performance, availability, support, compliance, and operations.
Criteria to confirm the savings did not break the service.
Beyond compute
Include data transfer, NAT Gateway, observability, logs, snapshots, storage tiering, dev/test environments, and AI traffic.
Continuous FinOps should become a monthly cadence between engineering and finance, not a one-off audit.
FinOps services
How we optimize your AWS costs
Assessment and quick wins
Analysis of your current AWS bill to identify immediate waste: idle instances, unattached EBS, unused Elastic IPs, and over-provisioned resources. The initial focus is prioritizing low-risk savings opportunities before structural changes.
Right-sizing and Savings Plans
Instance right-sizing based on actual utilization. Recommendation and implementation of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances when usage patterns justify 1- to 3-year commitments.
Spot and optimized architecture
Spot Instances for interruption-tolerant workloads when the operational profile allows it. Architecture review to use serverless services (Lambda, Fargate) and storage tiers (S3 Intelligent-Tiering).
Governance and continuous FinOps
Cost dashboards with Cost Explorer and CUR. Budgets and automatic alerts. Tagging strategy for cost allocation by team, project, and environment. Monthly optimization reviews.
Elevata is a consulting company specialized in helping your business tap into the full potential of AWS. Whether it's generative AI, modernization, or migration, our solutions are built to support efficient, sustainable growth. As an AI-native AWS Advanced Partner, we bring deep AWS expertise to help you adopt generative AI and build secure, scalable cloud environments aligned with your business needs and focused on outcomes you can sustain and build on over time.
Savings depend on workload maturity, utilization, existing commitments, and architecture. In many environments, the first assessment identifies low-risk opportunities in idle resources, right-sizing, storage, and commitment planning. For larger targets, we use CUR and Cost Explorer data before recommending changes.
What is FinOps?
FinOps is a practice that combines engineering, finance, and business to manage cloud costs. It includes real-time cost visibility, allocation by team/project, continuous optimization, and a culture of cost accountability.
Does right-sizing affect performance?
It should not when validated correctly. Right-sizing should use CPU, memory, network, I/O, performance targets, safety margin, validation window, and rollback. Changes without that evidence can create risk.
Does Elevata offer continuous optimization?
Yes. Beyond the initial assessment, we offer continuous FinOps as part of Elevata Orbit managed services. It includes monthly reviews, anomaly alerts, and Savings Plans updates as usage evolves.
Next step
Find out how much you can save on AWS
Get a free assessment of your AWS bill with quick win recommendations and an optimization roadmap.