The AWS Well Architected cost pillar.

Here is each principle as an action, the mechanism behind it, and roughly what it is worth.

Adopt a consumption model

The principle says pay only for the capacity you use. The action is to make capacity follow demand: autoscaling groups that shrink at night, scheduling that switches off non production environments outside working hours, and serverless where load is spiky. A development and test estate left running around the clock costs roughly four times what it needs to, because it idles through nights and weekends. Scheduling those environments to a working week pattern can remove a large share of their run rate without touching production.

Measure overall efficiency

The principle is to track the business output of each dollar spent. The action is a unit cost metric: cost per active customer, per transaction, or per gigabyte served. Absolute spend always rises with growth, which hides waste; unit cost shows whether each new dollar buys more or less than the last. When the unit metric trends down while volume grows, optimization is working. When it climbs, you have a problem the total bill alone will not reveal.

Stop spending on undifferentiated heavy lifting

The principle is to let AWS run the commodity layers. The action is to move self managed databases, queues, and patching onto managed services where the loaded cost of running them yourself, engineering time included, exceeds the service price. The win is rarely the sticker; it is the engineering hours returned to revenue work. The Graviton and gp3 migrations belong here too: standing efficiency moves that cut the rate for equivalent performance with low risk.

Analyse and attribute expenditure

The principle is to know who spends what. The action is the Cost and Usage Report as the source of truth, a tagging policy enforced at provisioning, and allocation down to team and service. Without attribution every other principle stalls, because no owner sees their own number. With it, anomaly detection can name a team and a resource, and accountability follows the cost.

Implement cloud financial management

The principle is to treat cost as an ongoing discipline, not a one off cleanup. The action is a review cadence, commitment coverage tied to a defensible forecast, and a small group that owns the operating model. This is the principle that keeps the other four from decaying, and it is where most savings are lost when programs treat optimization as a project rather than a practice.

Talk it through with us

If the Well Architected review flagged cost optimization and you want it turned into a ranked plan with numbers, that is exactly the work we do. We take zero provider commissions and answer only to you, across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. Our guarantee is plain: we reduce your cloud spend or we reimburse our service fee, on either a Fixed Fee scoped up front or a no risk Gainshare share of verified savings. Book a strategy call to scope it for your estate, and follow more analysis in The Cloud Spend Navigator.