The Pre-Flight Checklist: 9 Things to Analyze Before Cutting Any AWS Cost

The Pre-Flight Checklist: 9 Things to Analyze Before Cutting Any AWS Cost Tags: aws finops sre reliability devops Last month I saved $12K/year by cleaning up AWS waste across four accounts. But before I touched a single resource, I spent two days just analyzing. Not because I'm cautious by nature — because I've seen what happens when people skip this step. A colleague at a previous company followed AWS Cost Explorer's recommendation to downsize an RDS instance. It was 12% CPU average — seemed obvious. What they didn't check: that instance handled a 4x traffic spike every Friday at 6 PM. The downsize turned Friday evening into a 90-minute outage, a rollback, and an incident report that took longer to write than the analysis would have. The rule: never optimize what you don't fully understand. This article is the pre-flight checklist I run before every cost optimization. It's conversational by design — I want you to internalize the thinking, not just memorize a checklist. The SRE Guarant