Surprise AWS bills usually come from one of a handful of sources. Cost Explorer patterns, budget alerts, anomaly detection, and the tagging discipline that turns "who owns this $4,000 spike" into a 30-second answer instead of a week-long Slack thread.
Provisioned Concurrency is the most over-prescribed Lambda config in production. The break-even is a single equation — and most workloads sit on the wrong side of it. Memory tuning, Graviton savings, and the request-rate threshold where reserved capacity stops being a tax.
"We'll just have our developers manage AWS" is one of the most expensive decisions an engineering leader can make. A line-item TCO breakdown of in-house operations vs an AWS managed services provider for organizations from 10 to 500 engineers — including the costs that don't show up on the AWS bill.
Beyond Reserved Instances — practical FinOps and AWS cost optimization strategies to reduce your AWS bill by 20-40% without sacrificing performance or reliability.
