From $823 to $200: A Practical AWS Cost Optimization Case Study
Cloud cost optimization isn’t simply a matter of “switching to smaller servers.” It starts with understanding the actual workload, then using billing data and monitoring to identify the true sources of cost, and finally verifying through rolling deployments, health checks, and cold-start tests that the optimized system remains reliable.
Background: Fixed Costs in a Production Environment
This is a SaaS system that has gone live and supports real business operations. It maintains both Production and Staging AWS environments and includes a Dashboard, Gateway API, OpenAPI, SuperAdmin, asynchronous Workers, and infrastructure such as Aurora, Valkey, ALB, NAT Gateway, and CloudWatch.
Although the system’s overall load and resource utilization are relatively low, the UnblendedCost recorded by AWS Cost Explorer for the full billing cycle before optimization reached $822.96.
The goal was to bring monthly infrastructure costs down to roughly $100–$200 while preserving the ability to scale quickly as the business grows.
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