FinOps audit
A fixed-scope review of an AWS estate and its Kubernetes clusters: where the money goes, which findings survive scrutiny, and what to do in what order. Delivered as a report, not a dashboard login.
The savings number nobody can defend
Cost tools are generous. They sum every finding they produce, count the same dollars twice when two detectors reach them from different directions, and recommend actions the reader cannot execute — resizing a node an autoscaler owns, for instance. The resulting figure looks impressive until an engineer picks at it, and then the whole exercise loses credibility.
What we do
- Partition the bill so every line has an owner: usage types, clusters, namespaces, workloads.
- Reconcile findings against each other, so money counted by two detectors is claimed once.
- Discard advice the reader cannot act on, and rewrite it as the action they can.
- State the range rather than the maximum, with the basis for each end of it.
- Write down what we could not evaluate and why — the gap list is part of the deliverable, not an embarrassment.
How the work goes
- 01
Collect
Read-only access to billing data and a metrics agent in the clusters. Fourteen days of measurement gives usable percentiles; less is guessing.
- 02
Reconcile
Overlaps removed, each exclusion recorded with its reason. This step usually shrinks the headline figure substantially, which is the point.
- 03
Report
A document with the findings, the sequence to act in, what each step is worth, and what it depends on. Yours to keep and to forward.
What you get
- A written report with every figure traceable to a bill line and a date
- A ranked plan in waves, with dependencies and risks stated
- The list of what could not be evaluated, and what data would close each gap
A good fit when
- AWS estates with Kubernetes where the bill has grown faster than the traffic
- Anyone who has been handed a savings number they cannot defend internally
Not us, and we will say so
- Estates without measurement access — we will not estimate an environment we cannot observe
- Clients who want the largest possible number rather than the defensible one
Tell us what you are running.
A first call is a conversation. If this is not the service you need, we will point you at the one that is — or tell you that you do not need us yet.
Book a call