How we saved $1.86M on cloud costs with a FinOps strategy and hands-on optimization

Over a six-month engagement (September 2024 – February 2025), our FinOps team partnered with a large-scale enterprise to take control of their cloud expenses, strengthen financial governance, and embed a cost-conscious culture. By combining strategic cost-cutting initiatives with hands-on engineering optimizations, we achieved over $1.86 million in projected annual savings while enhancing long-term financial resilience.

Background and Objectives

The customer, operating across AWS and Azure, faced escalating cloud expenses compounded by insufficient cost visibility and governance challenges with monitoring tools like Datadog and logging systems. Our objective was to drive immediate cost savings and implement sustainable frameworks for ongoing optimization.

Key Challenges:

• Lack of structured cost attribution and monitoring visibility.
• Over-provisioned compute and storage resources.
• Inefficient cloud commitments lead to excessive on-demand spending.
• Redundant telemetry in Datadog and costly logging configurations.
• Absence of automated anomaly detection and proactive cost governance.

Phase 1: Quick Wins & Foundational Optimizations

Our engagement began with a thorough assessment of the customer’s cloud infrastructure, leading to immediate cost-saving actions.

Compute Resource Optimization:

• AWS Savings Plans: Increased commitment coverage to 95%, resulting in $30,000 monthly savings.
• Azure Commitment Plans: By consulting with the Dev teams, we were able to identify a new project with a stable workload, leveraging it to a tight-fitting reservation plan, yielding $16,800 in annual savings.s.
• Instance Rightsizing: Decommissioned inactive MySQL instances ($12.4K/month saved), removed unused EC2 instances and AMQ brokers ($13.3K annual savings), and optimized AWS Solana nodes and high-cost storage volumes ($34K/month saved).

Storage & Backup Optimization:

• DocumentDB Backup Cleanup: Removed redundant backups across multiple AWS regions, saving $29.4K per month.
• EBS Volume Cleanup: Eliminated unattached EBS volumes, reducing costs by $2.6K per month.
• Backup Lifecycle Automation: Streamlined retention policies, leading to $21.4K/month in additional savings.

Phase 2: Enhancing Observability and Cost Governance

Monitoring & Logging Optimization:

• Datadog Custom Metrics Review: Eliminated non-essential metrics (such as loops or unactionable metrics), cutting $30,000 in annual costs.
• Logging Cost Reduction: Adjusted configurations, reducing unexpected spikes and saving $23,000 annually.
• Anomaly Detection: Implemented proactive monitoring in Datadog and AWS Cost Explorer, preventing cost escalations such as:
  • Avoided a $300/month increase in DataDog APM host usage.
  • Optimized Coralogix logging service to prevent $922 in daily overages.
  • Addressed unapproved Datadog feature usage, avoiding $800 in monthly costs.

Phase 3: Strategic Commitments & Organizational Change

Beyond immediate cost-cutting, we focused on long-term FinOps governance and enterprise agreements.

Cloud Commitment Optimization:

• AWS & Azure Savings Plan Restructuring: Shifted from on-demand pricing to reserved capacity, saving $30K monthly.
• Microsoft Azure MACC Agreement: Optimized a projected $15M spend over three years, targeting over 20% savings.
• GCP Enterprise Agreement Planning: Initiated discussions to ensure competitive pricing and resource efficiency.

Cultural Shift & FinOps Integration:

• Custom Dashboards and Real-Time Insights
  Initially, the customer had limited cost visibility through fragmented usage reports and static monthly summaries. To address this,  we introduced Anodot during the first phases of the engagement, offering AI-powered anomaly detection and real-time alerts. These tools empowered stakeholders to monitor spend patterns, detect cost anomalies instantly, and make proactive budgetary decisions. 
• CI/CD Cost Awareness
  Prior to our involvement, the CI/CD pipelines lacked any visibility into cloud cost implications of builds, tests, or deployments. By embedding FinOps feedback loops into the DevOps lifecycle, we enabled teams to view projected cost impact per environment and build cycle. This was achieved using custom cost annotations coupled with notification triggers via Slack and Anodot. The result: teams began prioritizing cost efficiency alongside performance and reliability. 
• Cross-Team Collaboration and Recurring Governance
  Historically, cloud spending responsibilities were siloed, with limited engagement between engineering and finance. We facilitated the establishment of recurring FinOps syncs—monthly strategic reviews and weekly anomaly triage meetings—bringing together DevOps, security, finance, and product leads. These sessions used unified dashboards from CloudHealth and Anodot to align priorities, reinforce ownership, and ensure ongoing accountability across the organization.

Conclusion & Future Outlook

This case study demonstrates how our FinOps services not only delivered significant cost reductions but also instilled a culture of financial responsibility. By embedding FinOps best practices across engineering and finance teams, we helped the customer achieve over $1.86 million in projected annual savings.

Looking ahead, we will continue to refine our customers’ financial cloud posture by implementing a unified FinOps platform, expanding cost governance policies, and integrating cost-conscious thinking into project design phases. Our partnership underscores the transformative impact of FinOps: beyond optimizing cloud expenses, it creates a resilient, future-ready organization poised for sustainable growth in a dynamic digital landscape.

At Develeap, our FinOps journey is designed to be holistic and hands-on. We guide customers through a structured path, from initial discovery and assessment, where we uncover inefficiencies and benchmark maturity, through targeted remediation and cost optimization initiatives, and finally into a model of continuous improvement. Leveraging engineering expertise and close collaboration, we implement: Whether it’s rightsizing resources, restructuring commitments, refining monitoring setups, or building cost-aware CI/CD workflows, our team stays embedded with our customers to ensure FinOps is an evolving part of their engineering culture.