We Cut $120,000 from Our Cloud Bill Without Sacrificing Reliability

We were running a cloud-hosted platform on AWS EKS , with EC2 worker nodes managed by us, MongoDB Atlas for NoSQL workloads, AWS RDS for relational databases, and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis for caching and temporary data. Over time, the infrastructure had grown the way most real systems grow: more services, more data, more backups, more images, more snapshots, and more “temporary” resources that were no longer temporary. The platform worked, but the cloud bill was higher than it needed to be. So we started cutting waste, improving the application, and resizing the infrastructure around how the system actually behaved. The result: around $120,000 in annual savings , without sacrificing reliability. The Problem Was Not One Big Thing When we started reviewing the infrastructure, it was clear that there was no single expensive resource causing the entire problem. The cost came from many places at once. Some services were using more CPU and memory than they needed. Some microservices did not really need to be separate anymore. Some databases were oversized for their actual usage. Some storage had accumulated over time. Some backups and snapshots were kept longer than necessary. Some resources were simply unused. That is usually how cloud costs grow. Not because of one bad decision, but because of hundreds of small decisions that were reasonable at the time and never revisited later. So instead of looking for one magic fix, we approached the problem from multiple angles: application code, architecture, databases, Kubernetes resources, storage, backups, caching, and non-production environments. The Optimizations 1. Making the Application Use Fewer Resources One of the most important parts of the optimization was improving the application itself. It is easy to look at cloud cost as an infrastructure problem only, but inefficient code directly affects infrastructure cost. If the application uses too much CPU or memory, the platform needs more pods, larger nodes, bigger ins