Engagement Scenarios
Cost Optimization Sprint
A cost optimization sprint reduces waste and improves cost visibility without blindly cutting reliability, security, or developer experience.
Sprint inputs
Collect:
- Spend by account, service, team, and environment.
- Tag coverage and unallocated spend.
- Top cost drivers and growth trends.
- Idle or unattached resources.
- Autoscaling settings and utilization.
- Commitment coverage and renewal dates.
- Known upcoming traffic or migration events.
Sprint flow
Common actions
- Delete orphaned resources.
- Right-size compute and databases.
- Add TTLs for ephemeral environments.
- Improve autoscaling limits.
- Move logs or metrics to appropriate retention tiers.
- Review data transfer and egress patterns.
- Buy commitments after usage stabilizes.
Guardrails
Every optimization should identify expected savings, owner, rollback path, and reliability risk. Do not remove redundancy, backups, logs, or security controls without explicit risk acceptance.
Watchouts
- Untagged spend is an ownership problem first.
- Reserved commitments can lock in waste.
- Cost reductions can move spend to another team or service.
- Some spikes indicate abuse, incidents, or lifecycle failures.