Specimen · representative data
Findings report: Acme Widget Co
Client: redacted-client-name · Period reviewed: 90 days · Prepared by Hannah Lyons
§1 Executive summary
Monthly AWS spend was $4,180. After the changes below it is $3,038, a 27% reduction, with a further $601/month available in the recommendations section.
Applied savings, annualized: $13,704 against a $3,000 engagement fee. Nothing in this report required application changes; every fix was infrastructure-level and reversible.
§2 Savings table
| Item | Monthly before | Monthly after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Idle EC2 instances (3) applied | $412 | $0 | -$412 |
| Unattached EBS volumes + aged snapshots applied | $186 | $0 | -$186 |
| RDS rightsizing, db.r5.xlarge to db.r6g.large applied | $604 | $212 | -$392 |
| NAT gateway data processing, moved S3 traffic to VPC gateway endpoints applied | $273 | $121 | -$152 |
| OpenSearch domain rightsizing recommended | $388 | $192 | -$196 |
| S3 lifecycle policies on log buckets recommended | $142 | $47 | -$95 |
| 1-year compute savings plan recommended | -$310 | ||
| Total, applied | $4,180 | $3,038 | -$1,142 |
§3 Fixes applied
- Terminated 3 idle EC2 instances (i-04f9e21c07b3, 2 more) after 30-day CloudWatch review and owner sign-off. Rollback: AMIs retained 90 days.
- Deleted 14 unattached EBS volumes and 212 snapshots older than the retention policy agreed on the review call. Rollback: final snapshots of the 14 volumes retained 90 days.
- Rightsized production RDS after 4 weeks of utilization data (peak CPU 11%). Applied in the Tuesday maintenance window; rollback is a modify-instance call.
- Created VPC gateway endpoints for S3 in us-east-9; NAT processing dropped same day.
§4 Drift prevention
- AWS Budgets alert at $3,200/month to ops@redacted, anomaly detection enabled account-wide
- Tagging standard recommended for owner/environment, enforcement via SCP drafted
- Suggested cadence: 15 minutes monthly against this report's savings table
§5 Access removal
Cross-account role arn:aws:iam::123456789:role/huey revoked by client 2026-07-14, confirmed in CloudTrail.
Specimen document. Representative numbers, not a client record. Client reports are never published, with or without redactions. This specimen shows the exact format you receive at the end of a Cloud Cost Cleanup.