I've went through this process with a couple companies running medium-size infra. Basically every month we would import the detailed billing report into a goog

I've went through this process with a couple companies running medium-size infra. Basically every month we would import the detailed billing report into a google sheet (SQL queries in your spreadsheet are awesome btw), do some analysis on the heavy hitting services, and come up with a couple solutions to address those. Rinse and repeat. A few big hitters I remember off-hand: 1. Obviously shut down and remove anything you're not using -- instances, ebs volumes, etc. 2. ELB - paying per-request for many small requests; and you pay double on the bandwidth in some cases. Switched to terminating ssl using nginx on the frontends and using dns load balancing to save a pretty good chunk of money. 3. vpc endpoints for s3 - can be significant savings if you're doing a lot of I/O on s3 from private instances in a vpc over a nat gateway. 4. new instance types -- the newer instance types typically have more compute/ram/disk for less money, migrate to them. 5. Consolidate services onto a smaller number of VMs where it makes sense Once you learn some of these tricks, you just sorta do them that way from the start on new products. Best practices in terms of spend on these platforms.