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Work · SaaS / Cloud Infrastructure
A cloud cost audit and FinOps re-architecture
Auditing and re-architecting cloud spend for a growing SaaS company whose infrastructure bill was outpacing its user base, with no per-team cost visibility.
blueprint28 May 2026
27%
Average cloud spend that goes to waste, industry-wide
84%
Orgs calling cloud-spend management their top cloud challenge (Flexera)
$723B
Global public cloud spend forecast
This is a solution blueprint — a reference architecture we can build for your business. The figures above are cited industry benchmarks for this class of system, not results claimed for a named client.
The pipeline we'd build
4 stages
Stage 01 · Cost map
Tag-based cost allocation goes across every account, so spend can finally be attributed.
The challenge
A growing SaaS company's cloud bill grew faster than its user base, and finance had no reliable way to attribute spend to product lines — idle and oversized resources were suspected but never actually measured.
What we did
We implement tag-based cost allocation across every account, right-size EC2/RDS instances from real 30-day utilization data, move steady-state workloads onto Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, and enforce automated idle-resource cleanup via Terraform guardrails.
The outcome
Flexera's 2024-2025 State of the Cloud research puts average cloud waste at 27% and found 84% of organizations call managing cloud spend their top cloud challenge — the two numbers this audit is built to move.
Stack
AWSTerraformKubernetes (EKS)DatadogKubecostReserved Instances / Savings Plans
Flexera's State of the Cloud research has put average cloud waste in the high-20s percent range for several years running, and found 84% of organizations call managing cloud spend their top cloud challenge — while Gartner forecasts global public cloud spend climbing past $723B, meaning the absolute dollars at stake keep growing even as the waste percentage holds roughly steady.
Where the waste typically hides
Cloud waste rarely comes from one obvious culprit — it accumulates across idle dev/staging environments left running over weekends, oversized instances provisioned for a traffic spike that never repeated, and orphaned storage volumes nobody remembers attaching. The chart below shows a typical first-audit breakdown before cleanup.
Where cloud spend typically leaks
A common first-audit breakdown before a FinOps cleanup
Idle / oversized computeUnmonitored API & storage callsRedundant environmentsRight-sized & optimized
Illustrative first-audit split consistent with Flexera's published waste-driver categories — every environment differs.
| Slice | Share of spend |
|---|---|
| Idle / oversized compute | 34% |
| Unmonitored API & storage calls | 22% |
| Redundant environments | 14% |
| Right-sized & optimized | 30% |
Tagging before cutting
The audit starts with tagging, not cutting: every resource gets attributed to a team and product line before anything is resized or shut down, so the savings are durable rather than a one-time cleanup that drifts back within a quarter. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans absorb the predictable steady-state load; autoscaling and idle-resource guardrails, enforced via Terraform, handle the rest — the same infrastructure-as-code discipline behind our CI/CD modernization blueprint.
At a glance
Client
Solution blueprint
Sector
SaaS / Cloud Infrastructure
Service
Cloud & DevOps
Kind
blueprint
Headline result
27% · Average cloud spend that goes to waste, industry-wide
Handover
Documented, tested code in your repository
Questions we were asked
Is 27% cloud waste a real, current figure?
Yes — Flexera's State of the Cloud research has put average cloud waste in the high-20s percent range for several consecutive years (27% in both the 2024 and 2025 reports), a stable, widely-cited industry figure, not an estimate we invented.
Will rightsizing break anything in production?
The audit works from 30 days of real utilization data before touching anything, and changes roll out gradually with monitoring in place — the goal is removing waste, not introducing new risk.
Do we need Kubernetes for this to apply?
No — tag-based cost allocation and rightsizing apply whether you're running EC2 instances directly, ECS, or EKS. The audit adapts to whatever compute model you're already running.
Same problem, different business?
We'll send the architecture and a realistic timeline for your version of this — no obligation.