Cost Optimization & FinOps

CloudZero, Vantage, Finout, nOps, ProsperOps, and Kubecost on AWS — platform selection guide plus who implements tagging, allocation, and architecture savings.

Production guide for Kubecost on AWS EKS — cost allocation setup plus architecture changes that reduce spend, not just attribute it.

Implement ProsperOps on AWS — Savings Plans automation works best after baseline modeling and architecture stability. Production checklist included.

EC2 On-Demand is a matrix of family, size, OS, tenancy, and region. In us-east-1 (June 2026) a m7g.large Linux runs $0.0816/hr vs a g5.xlarge GPU at $1.006/hr.

ElastiCache bills node-hours for Redis/Valkey clusters and ECPUs for Serverless. A cache.r7g.large with two replicas is 3× the primary node cost before data transfer. Serverless wins below ~$800/mo steady cache spend; provisioned nodes win above it.

Fargate bills per vCPU-second and GB-second, not per task hour. In us-east-1 a 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB task runs ~$9/mo; a 4 vCPU / 16 GB task ~$145/mo.

A 22-account AWS Organization spent $1.1M/yr on Compute Savings Plans but applied only 61% to production — dev sandboxes burned the commit while prod stayed On-Demand. Group Sharing (April 2026) fixed attribution; the waste was $312k/yr before they restructured purchases.

CUR 2.0 (generally available 2024, default for new exports in 2025) adds line-item resource IDs and Savings Plan attribution columns Athena needs for serious chargeback. A standard FinOps query pack answers top-10 services, untagged spend, and SP coverage in under 60 seconds.

Compute Optimizer added 32-day lookback for cyclic workloads in 2025 — critical for monthly batch jobs that looked oversized on 14-day windows. In a June 2026 audit of a $48k/mo account, rightsizing recommendations alone modeled $11k/mo savings at low performance risk.

Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.

Bedrock AgentCore is metered across twelve distinct components — Runtime, Browser, Code Interpreter, Gateway, Identity, Memory (two tiers), Observability, Evaluations, Payments, Search, and the underlying model spend. Two of them drive 80% of the bill.

CloudFront bills $0.085/GB egress in North America tiered down to $0.020/GB at extreme volume, plus $0.0075–$0.0100 per 10K requests, plus origin egress. Regional price classes drop the bill 30–60% by skipping expensive geographies. Real-time logs at $0.01 per million entries surprise high-traffic sites. Lambda@Edge is dramatically more expensive than CloudFront Functions.