How a 40-Person Manufacturer Cut Cloud Costs 60%

The Problem

A regional manufacturer had successfully transitioned from on-premise servers to AWS, but they brought their "data center mentality" with them. They were running oversize EC2 instances for internal apps that only saw traffic 9-5 M-F.

They were paying $12,000/month for infrastructure that should have cost a fraction of that.

Our Approach

We performed a deep-dive audit of their AWS account and identified three key areas of waste:

1. Zombie Instances: Dev servers left running 24/7.
2. Over-provisioning: Production servers running at 5% CPU utilization.
3. Storage Costs: Terabytes of old backups stored in high-cost S3 tiers.

The Solution

We implemented a "switch it off" automation strategy.

// Example of the logic we implemented for auto-shutdown
const schedule = {
    start: '08:00', // Start servers at 8 AM
    stop: '18:00',  // Stop servers at 6 PM
    days: ['MON', 'TUE', 'WED', 'THU', 'FRI']
};

We also moved them to reserved instances for their core production services and set up Lifecycle Rules for their S3 buckets to automatically move old data to Glacier.

The Results

The impact was immediate. The next month's bill dropped to $4,800.

"We were afraid to touch anything because we didn't want to break it. DataOps Group showed us exactly what was safe to change." — CTO

This engagement paid for itself in less than two months.