FinOps Success Story: How to Save $1M in AWS
Interesting company FinOps success story
Victor Garcia
August 17, 2025
Together with DoiT
Stop Cloud Waste Before It Eats Your Margins
Learn how leading FinOps teams bring clarity to chaos, eliminate waste, and bring spend back in line with business value. It’s time to fix the fundamentals and build for sustainable, profitable growth.
In this webinar, DoiT FinOps experts share proven frameworks, real‑world examples, and practical steps to align cloud spend with measurable business value.
COST OPTIMIZATION
How to Save $1M in AWS
Recall.ai runs meeting bots for hundreds of companies and processes millions of meetings each month on AWS. Like many cloud-based companies, they faced a big problem: their AWS bills were getting too expensive.
The team set an ambitious goal to cut their CPU usage in half, which would slash their cloud computing costs by the same amount. But when they looked closer at what was actually eating up their CPU, they got a big surprise.
The real issue turned out to be WebSockets. The company was using WebSockets to move raw video data from their headless Chrome browsers to their video processing systems. WebSockets had two main problems that made them expensive to run:
First, Chrome breaks up large messages into smaller chunks called fragments. A single video frame gets split into 24 separate pieces. Second, WebSockets require masking all data for security reasons. This means every single byte gets processed through an extra security step.
The team looked at three alternatives: raw TCP/IP, Unix Domain Sockets, and Shared Memory. Shared Memory was the most efficient option. It lets multiple programs access the same block of memory directly, so no copying is needed at all.
They built a custom ring buffer system that could handle multiple Chrome threads writing data while one thread reads it.
After building and deploying this new system along with other improvements, they cut their CPU usage by up to 50 percent. This single change to how they move data around saved Recall.ai over one million dollars per year in AWS costs.
ENTERPRISE
Put FinOps First to Control Cloud Growth
Companies are spending more money on cloud services but getting less value back. A new report shows that by 2028, one out of every four companies will be unhappy with what they get from the cloud.
The main problem is simple: businesses are growing their cloud use faster than they can control it. This leads to waste and higher bills without better results.
Most companies only look at costs after they've already spent the money. Only 43% of organizations can track their cloud costs in detail.
The smarter approach is to think about costs before making decisions, not after.
Another issue is that the people who watch costs are often far away from the people who make spending decisions. The best companies put cost responsibility directly with the teams who build and run their systems.
Companies also struggle to connect their cloud spending to real business value. While 87% of organizations say cost efficiency is their top cloud goal, many can't explain how their spending helps their actual business outcomes.
FINOPS EVENTS
Mastering AI Economics
AI workloads are powerful but they’re also expensive. In this webinar, we’ll break down practical strategies to manage, develop, and reduce unit costs across your AI stack.
Learn how top engineering and FinOps teams are aligning performance with budget by optimizing architecture, tracking true cost per model, and using practical insights to stay ahead of runaway spend.
What we’ll cover:
Understanding unit costs: What they are, why they matter, and how to track them
Cost-efficient architecture: Design patterns and trade-offs that lower compute and storage bills
Data & model strategy: How to optimize what you train, when, and where
FinOps for AI: Building transparency and accountability into fast-moving AI teams
Speakers
Vaibhav Sharma
David Gross
Alon Savo
Host: Victor Garcia
September 9th - 6:00 PM CEST / 10AM EST
AWS
Unlocking Value: Advanced AWS S3 Cost Management
AWS S3 storage has become the forgotten wasteland of cloud computing. While everyone focuses on cutting costs for fancy services like Kubernetes and AI tools, S3 quietly grows into a massive expense that nobody wants to deal with.
The problem is simple but sneaky. S3 costs seem small at first, so teams dump everything there without thinking twice. Old backup files, forgotten test data, duplicate copies of the same files - it all piles up like junk in an attic.
One company found a nine-year-old backup labeled "DO NOT DELETE" that nobody could explain.
Most companies try to fix this with Amazon's Intelligent Tiering feature. This tool moves old files to cheaper storage automatically for just $2.50 per million objects. It works well and saves money, but it doesn't solve the real problem.
The real issue is that teams can't see what's actually stored in their S3 buckets. Without clear data on what files get used and which ones sit untouched, it's nearly impossible to clean up the mess.
With better tools to see what's actually stored in S3, companies can finally start treating it like any other important service that needs regular cleanup and optimization.
CLOUD PROVIDERS
Microsoft Pricing Update, New GCP FinOps Tools & AWS Multiple Cost Updates
AWS
EC2 Reserved Capacity can now be shared with accounts outside your AWS Organization, giving more flexibility for partner arrangements and complex structures.
Creative studios get budget relief with AWS Deadline Cloud's new Spot Instance integration for rendering workloads. Meanwhile, AI teams can right-size with single-GPU P5 instances instead of overpaying for multi-GPU setups.
Other highlights include enhanced AWS Resource Explorer with multi-value filtering, Systems Manager runbooks with validation controls, and expanded AWS Config resource tracking. The standout cost-saver: AWS Batch on Fargate now supports Graviton-based Spot compute - combining Spot pricing, Graviton performance, and serverless simplicity.
SageMaker HyperPod adds granular compute quotas for AI training budget control, while AWS Cloud Map enables cross-account service discovery to simplify multi-account architectures.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft earned Gartner Leader status in Container Management for 2025, highlighting their mature Azure Kubernetes Service platform.
For global operations, Microsoft is standardizing pricing consistency across regions by aligning local currencies more regularly with USD exchange rates, making budget forecasting more predictable.
Google Cloud
Google launched two major cost management tools: Optimization Hub centralizes all cost-saving recommendations, while the new Cost Explorer helps developers visualize spending patterns. These native FinOps tools significantly enhance Google Cloud's cost management capabilities.
PUBLIC SECTOR
UK Invests £9B in Microsoft Amidst Budget Challenges
The UK government just signed a deal to spend £9 billion on Microsoft products over five years, even as the country faces a massive £40 billion budget gap.
The deal, called Strategic Partnership Arrangement 2024, started last November. It lets schools, hospitals, councils, and other public services buy Microsoft software at special group prices. The government spent £1.9 billion in just the first few months and expects to spend about the same amount each year through 2029.
This spending plan comes at a tough time for Britain's finances. Experts say the government needs to find over £40 billion through tax increases or spending cuts to balance its books by 2030. The Microsoft contract runs through the entire current government term, making it a long-term commitment.
Public organizations don't buy directly from Microsoft under this deal. Instead, they purchase through approved resellers who offer the negotiated discounts.
The government argues this deal provides the best commercial value and removes barriers for public sector growth. However, critics point out that free open-source alternatives exist that could save taxpayers billions of pounds.
📺️ VIDEO
How to Make Your Engineers Take Action in FinOps with Larry Advey (FINOPS EXPERT)
Larry Advey, an experienced FinOps practitioner and maintainer of the FOCUS specification, shared game-changing insights on collaboration that challenge conventional wisdom about working with different personas in organizations.
Whether you're struggling to get engineering teams on board with cost optimization or wrestling with multi-cloud cost visibility, this deep dive into FinOps collaboration strategies offers practical solutions you can implement immediately.
🎖️ MENTION OF HONOUR
AWS Pricing in Graphs - Open Source
Frank Contrepois built a helpful website that shows AWS pricing data in easy-to-read charts. The site uses Observable Framework to turn boring price numbers into colorful graphs that help people pick the best AWS regions for their projects.
Storage Costs Across Regions
For S3 storage, the median price is $0.025 per hour for the first gigabyte. If you pay more than this, you better have a good reason. The cheapest places to store files are Asia Pacific regions like Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia, plus some European spots like Ireland and Stockholm. All these cost just $0.023 per hour.
Server Costs Tell a Different Story
Running a small t3.micro server shows interesting patterns. The median cost is $0.0121 per hour across all regions. US East regions like Virginia and Ohio offer the cheapest compute power, while places like South America and some Asian regions cost more.
Service Availability Matters Too
US East Virginia leads with over 350 AWS services available. Most major regions offer 200+ services, but newer or smaller regions might only have 50-100 services.
The data reveals that picking an AWS region involves balancing cost, service availability, and your specific needs rather than just going with the cheapest option.
Professional Spotlight
Ashley Hromatko
FinOps Legend
Ashley has been one of the professionals I’ve followed the most since I started in FinOps. She’s an early member of the movement, and shares amazing knowledge every time she talks about FinOps.
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
Join FinOps professionals at the FinOps Weekly Summit 2025 and discover how to:
Transform from reactive fire-fighting to strategic leadership — Learn the proven frameworks that top practitioners use to turn cloud cost management into a competitive advantage
Master AI-powered cost optimization — Get exclusive access to the latest automation tools and techniques that can reduce your cloud spend by up to 40% while accelerating innovation
Build bulletproof unit economics — Walk away with actionable playbooks for calculating true cloud ROI and proving business value to executives who control your budget
"But I don't have time for another webinar..."
This isn't another generic webinar. This is the only major FinOps event left in 2025, featuring battle-tested strategies from companies managing billions in cloud spend.
October 23rd, 2025 | 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM CEST
Limited seats available