Cost optimisation on AWS: a practical weekly checklist

Most cloud cost programmes fail for one simple reason: they’re treated as a finance exercise instead of an engineering habit.

AWS’ Well‑Architected Framework makes cost optimisation one of its core pillars—because good architecture decisions are usually good cost decisions too.

Below is a weekly checklist we use with teams to reduce waste without slowing delivery.

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1) Make tagging non‑negotiable (and enforce it)

If you can’t answer “what is this for?” you can’t optimise.

Minimum useful tags:

- `service` / `product` - `env` (prod/stage/dev) - `owner` (team) - `cost-center`

Then enforce:

- tag policies - CI checks for IaC - account-level guardrails for new resources

2) Track unit economics, not just totals

A £50k monthly bill can be healthy if it maps to growing usage.

Pick 1–2 metrics leadership understands:

- cost per active customer - cost per 1,000 API calls - cost per transaction

3) Build a “top 10” waste report

Don’t boil the ocean. Every week, review:

- idle compute (low CPU + low network) - over-provisioned databases - unattached volumes / stale snapshots - NAT gateway and data transfer hotspots

Then fix one thing and measure impact.

4) Put budgets + alerts where engineers will see them

Budgets that only finance sees don’t change behaviour.

Good patterns:

- per-environment budgets (dev/stage) - anomaly alerts - Slack/Teams notifications to the owning team

5) Make cost part of design reviews

The cheapest cloud bill is the one you never create.

Add a lightweight architecture review step:

- expected traffic + growth - data transfer assumptions - caching strategy - SLO targets vs spend targets

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How PG Technologies helps

We help teams make AWS cost optimisation repeatable:

- Well‑Architected reviews (cost + reliability + security) - platform engineering and observability - FinOps tagging, dashboards, governance - performance work that reduces spend *and* improves UX

Sources

- AWS Well‑Architected Framework: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/