Practical guide · HeroIT

AWS cost checklist before you start cutting blindly

Good cost optimisation does not start by switching off a random server. First understand who owns the spend, why it exists and what operational risk a change creates.

20-min discovery call ›AWS cost optimisation ›

1. Establish visibility

Cost without ownership is difficult to optimise.

Budgets and variance alerts
Tags or another cost-allocation model
Accounts, services, regions and spend trends

2. Find waste

Focus on measured utilisation.

Idle and forgotten resources
Oversized compute and database capacity
Old snapshots, volumes and unsuitable storage tiers
Data-transfer and architectural cost drivers

3. Optimise continuously

A one-off cleanup does not create discipline.

Regular cost reviews with owners
Rightsize from measured utilisation
Use commitment models only after a stable baseline and understood risk

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Should we buy Savings Plans or reservations immediately?

Not automatically. Validate workload stability and utilisation baseline first; commitments make sense against understood demand.

What should we review first?

Cost visibility, ownership and unused or clearly oversized resources.

Is optimisation a one-off project?

No. AWS environments and demand change, so cost review is an ongoing operational discipline.

Want to know where AWS spend is actually going?

HeroIT combines cost visibility with architecture and operational risk.

20-min discovery call ›