What Are AWS Managed Services? A Complete Guide to Benefits & Costs
Are you experiencing sporadic downtime or struggling with the complexities of configuration management?
Every month, Anna proudly saves about $200 by clipping coupons, comparing discounts, and stacking deals. She feels great about being smart with her money. But when a friend asked her about her mortgage interest rate, she admitted she had never checked it. After a quick review, it turned out she was overpaying by 1.5%, costing her thousands each year.
Anna was not wrong to optimize her grocery bill. However, she was focused on small savings while completely ignoring a much bigger financial opportunity.
In the world of FinOps, this mindset shows up all the time. Teams celebrate small automations that save a few hundred dollars a month while overlooking strategic actions like right-sizing compute or committing to long-term discounts. These actions could save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. That is what we mean by being penny-wise and dollar-foolish.
It feels good to fix visible things. Tagging issues, idle resources, and zombie volumes are tangible, measurable, and easy to explain. It is satisfying to check them off a list.
Big spend issues are harder. They involve politics, architectural changes, and cross-team collaboration. They might require long-term commitments or carry perceived risks.
Sometimes, no one owns the big picture. FinOps teams fight fires, engineers tune workloads, and finance sets budgets, but no one connects the dots and asks the most important question: where is the real money going?
How to Flip the Mindset:
Anna is not wrong to chase small savings, and neither are we in FinOps. Efficiency is part of the culture. But when your cloud bill is in the millions, the real job is finding and acting on the decisions that matter.
If your team is spending more time automating shutdowns than optimizing your largest workloads or commitments, it is time to take a step back. The biggest savings are not found in dev environments or idle disks. They are hiding in plain sight if you are willing to look at the big picture.
It refers to the tendency of teams to focus on minor, easy-to-fix costs while ignoring large-scale strategic opportunities that could save much larger sums of money.
Large-scale optimizations often require architectural changes, cross-team collaboration, or financial commitments that carry perceived risks, making them more difficult than simple resource cleanup.
The Pareto principle suggests that 80% of your cloud costs likely come from 20% of your resources. Identifying and focusing on that 20% ensures your efforts yield the highest possible return.
Not at all. They help build a culture of efficiency. However, they should not come at the expense of addressing the primary cost drivers in your production environment.
Start by identifying your top five most expensive services or workloads. Analyze their utilization and explore commitment-based discounts (like Savings Plans) or architectural right-sizing for those specific areas.
Are you experiencing sporadic downtime or struggling with the complexities of configuration management?
