Cutting Cloud Costs 40% While Improving Reliability for a Fintech Startup

The Challenge

The client had grown rapidly from seed to Series B, and their infrastructure had grown with them — but without a plan. They had 50+ manually provisioned EC2 instances, no infrastructure-as-code, deployments that took 2-4 hours, and a monthly AWS bill that was growing 15% month-over-month despite flat traffic. Their small DevOps team was spending 80% of their time firefighting instead of building.

Our Solution

We ran a 12-week engagement with two senior cloud engineers. In the first two weeks, we audited the entire AWS environment, mapped dependencies, and identified quick wins. We then implemented a phased migration: containerized applications with Docker, deployed to EKS with Terraform-managed infrastructure, implemented spot instances for non-critical workloads, and set up proper monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana. We also established tagging standards, cost alerts, and a monthly FinOps review process.

Results

• 40% reduction in monthly cloud spend ($180K → $108K/month)
• Deployment time reduced from 2-4 hours to under 10 minutes
• 99.95% uptime (up from 99.2%)
• Infrastructure fully codified in Terraform — reproducible and auditable
• DevOps team reclaimed 60% of their time for new initiatives

Technologies Used