I want to walk through a full engagement from start to finish

Not a highlight reel. The whole thing, including the parts that were slower and messier than I expected

B2B SaaS company. 12 employees. AWS account. Monthly spend when I started: $19,200

Their CTO had looked at the bill and estimated it should be around $8,000 to $10,000 for their workload. He was right. That instinct was correct. But he didn't know where the extra $9,000 was coming from and didn't have time to find it

Day one: I asked for read-only access to the account and access to their CloudWatch metrics. No write access at this stage. I wanted to understand the whole picture before touching anything

Day one findings: six areas worth investigating. CloudWatch Logs retention policies not set. RDS over-provisioned. EC2 instances with CPU utilization under 15 percent consistently. S3 Standard storage on objects not accessed in over a year. Data transfer between regions.…