u/ImpressiveIdea6123

We run cloud cost management for mid-market AWS customers and pulled data from our anomaly detection across accounts last quarter.

The results were honestly embarrassing - and familiar:

- 53% of anomalies: forgotten dev/test resources (EC2s, EBS volumes, NAT gateways left running after a sprint ended)
- 21%: data transfer costs nobody budgeted for, usually cross-AZ or egress to the internet
- 14%: RDS instances over-provisioned during a peak that never got right-sized
- 12%: everything else (Lambda timeouts, S3 lifecycle rules misconfigured, etc.)

The wild part? Most of these weren't caught by AWS Cost Anomaly Detection natively - they were caught by threshold alerts we set manually.

AWS CAD is free and a good starting point, but it's terrible at catching slow-burning waste (costs that creep up 5–10% a week rather than spiking). It's optimized for sudden spikes, not gradual drift.

This is an open discussion. Is your biggest cost leak dev waste, over-provisioning, or something else entirely?

Are FinOps Foundation certifications still relevant today? Asking for our team of cloud engineers, trying to optimize our cost and resources?

We always assumed our AWS bill was high because we were growing. Turns out… not really.

When we actually dug in, about 30% of our EC2 instances were sitting under 15% CPU for months. Staging was fully provisioned 24/7 even though it was only used maybe 10–15 hours a week. And no one touched any of it because ownership was unclear.

We had dashboards, but they didn’t answer the basic stuff:
what’s underutilized, who owns it, and what can safely be turned off.

On top of that, most of our spend was still on on-demand, while our Savings Plans didn’t really line up with how we were actually using resources.

After cleaning up idle stuff and fixing some of the commitment mismatch, we saw around a 20–25% drop in the bill within a couple weeks.

At this point it feels less like a scaling problem and more like a visibility + ownership problem.

Curious if others have seen something similar?