AWS Cost Optimization & Audits

Stop Overpaying for AWS.
We Audit. You Save.

AWS bills grow quietly. Idle resources, oversized databases, over-provisioned IOPS nobody is using, on-demand pricing on workloads that should be on Savings Plans, and Org-level settings that were never configured — it adds up fast. Modern Logic performs a thorough review across every account in your AWS Organization, surfaces what’s wasted and what’s mysterious, and delivers a prioritized plan of configuration changes, commitment strategy, and account-level cost controls that cut your bill without slowing your team down.

The inner workings of a spinning-platter hard disk drive.

What We Find

AWS Audit Findings We Deliver

  • Unused & Idle Resources

    We identify EC2 instances running at near-zero CPU, unattached EBS volumes, idle load balancers, unused Elastic IPs, and orphaned snapshots — the kind of resources that quietly bill every month while delivering no value.

  • Right-Sizing Recommendations

    Oversized EC2 instances and RDS databases are one of the largest sources of waste. We analyze CloudWatch metrics across CPU, memory, network, and IOPS to recommend instance families and sizes that fit your actual workload — not the ones you guessed at a year ago.

  • Savings Plans & Reserved Instances

    We model your steady-state compute and database usage, then recommend the right mix of Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances — including term length and payment option — so you capture the discount without locking into capacity you don’t need.

  • Forgotten & Mystery Services

    Every audit turns up expensive line items nobody on the current team can fully explain — a Private CA from a project that wrapped up two years ago, provisioned IOPS allocations that get nowhere near their ceiling, build agents running 24/7 for a workflow that’s now serverless. We surface the mystery spend, ask the right questions, and give you a confident plan to retire or right-size each one.

  • Legacy Tooling Migration

    Self-hosted CI platforms, always-on build agents, and legacy services running on big EC2 instances are some of the largest hidden line items we find. We identify which of these can be migrated to managed services or modern serverless equivalents — often eliminating an entire workload from your bill instead of just trimming it.

Both Sides of the Bill

Configuration Changes and Commitment Strategy

  • Compute (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda)

    Right-sizing, Graviton migration paths, Spot opportunities, and idle cluster cleanup.

  • Databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB)

    Instance right-sizing, storage type review, and reserved capacity recommendations.

  • Storage (S3, EBS, EFS)

    Lifecycle policies, storage class transitions, and orphaned volume cleanup.

  • Networking (NAT, Transfer, CloudFront)

    Reducing cross-AZ and NAT Gateway traffic, VPC endpoint opportunities, and CDN offload.

  • Savings Plans & RIs

    Commitment modeling so you buy the right term, family, and payment option for your real usage.

  • Tagging & Cost Allocation

    Tag policies and cost allocation so finance can finally see which team or product is driving spend.

Audit Strategy

AWS Account Review and Cost Optimization Consulting

  • Read-Only Account Review

    We work from a read-only IAM role — no changes to your account during the audit. You see exactly what we see, and you keep full control of when and how recommendations get applied.

  • Prioritized Recommendations

    Not every finding is worth the engineering time to fix. We rank recommendations by estimated monthly savings and implementation effort so you can knock out the high-value, low-risk wins first.

Hard-Won Experience

Solving Real-World AWS Cost Problems

  • The Forgotten Environment

    A client had a staging environment running production-sized RDS clusters and EC2 fleets after a migration. Nobody owned it, nobody used it, and it was costing thousands a month. We found it, mapped the dependencies, and gave them a safe shutdown plan.

  • The Wrong Savings Plan

    More than once we’ve seen teams buy a 3-year All Upfront Compute Savings Plan based on peak usage, then refactor onto Lambda or Graviton and end up paying for commitments they can’t use. We model usage carefully and recommend term and coverage that match how your architecture actually evolves.

  • NAT Gateway Surprises

    A client’s NAT Gateway charges had quietly grown to be the single largest line item on their bill — driven by a chatty service pulling from S3 across AZs. A few VPC endpoints and an architectural tweak cut that line item by over 80%.

How We Audit

How Modern Logic Audits AWS Accounts

We combine AWS-native tooling — Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, Trusted Advisor, CUR data, and CloudWatch metrics — with hands-on architectural review to build a complete picture of where your money is going. This lets us:

  • Identify idle, oversized, and underutilized resources across every account and region — not just the obvious ones
  • Ask the hard questions about every expensive line item — is this still in use? does it need to run 24/7? does anyone own it?
  • Model Savings Plans and Reserved Instance scenarios against your real usage history
  • Verify Organization-level settings — cross-account Savings Plan and RI sharing, consolidated billing, cost allocation tags, and billing alerts
  • Quantify each recommendation with an estimated monthly and annual savings number

We deliver a written report with prioritized recommendations, a one-on-one walkthrough with your engineering and finance leads, and — if you want — hands-on help implementing the changes.

When your environment requires it, we work within your existing change-management, ticketing, and approval workflows so optimizations land safely in production.

Built for Trust

Secure by Default — Read-Only and Auditable

  • Read-Only IAM Access

    We operate from a least-privilege, read-only role you create and can revoke at any time.

  • No Data Exfiltration

    We pull metrics and configuration metadata only — never application data, customer records, or secrets.

  • Auditable Activity

    Every API call we make is visible in your CloudTrail. You can see exactly what we looked at and when.

  • Clear Scope & NDA

    Fixed scope, fixed deliverables, and an NDA up front. No surprises, no scope creep.

How We Work

Our Process for AWS Audits

AWS audits have more moving parts than they look — usage patterns, commitment math, architectural constraints, and organizational realities like which workloads can actually be changed. Our process accounts for all of it:

  • Discovery that includes the business context — not just usage data, but what’s growing, what’s being deprecated, and where the team is heading
  • Findings ranked by ROI — estimated monthly savings against implementation effort, so the high-value wins are obvious
  • Commitment modeling against real history — Savings Plans and RI recommendations backed by your actual usage curves, not vendor defaults
  • Implementation support if you want it — we can hand off the report or roll up our sleeves and help you ship the changes

By the time we deliver, every recommendation is backed by data, quantified in dollars, and ranked by effort. It’s not a generic checklist.

Frequently Asked Questions About AWS Audits

Modern Logic performs a comprehensive review of your AWS account to find unused resources, right-sizing opportunities, and configuration changes that lower your bill. We also model Savings Plans and Reserved Instances against your real usage and deliver a prioritized report with estimated monthly savings for every recommendation.

Savings vary by environment, but for accounts that haven’t had a recent audit, meaningful double-digit percentages of monthly spend are typical — and on under-managed environments the number can be substantially higher. Right-sizing and idle resource cleanup deliver immediate savings, while Savings Plans and Reserved Instances compound the discount over the term of the commitment. We quantify the expected savings per recommendation up front so you can decide what’s worth the engineering time.

Modern Logic is a custom software development firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Twin Cities) with deep AWS experience across compute, data, networking, and serverless workloads. We’ve built and operated production systems on AWS for years, which is why our audits go beyond a Trusted Advisor report — we understand the architectural tradeoffs behind every recommendation.

Modern Logic is headquartered in the Twin Cities and has been building and operating AWS-hosted products for over a decade. Our team handles cloud architecture, cost optimization audits, DevOps, and application development for AWS-based systems — all under one roof.

Compute Savings Plans give the deepest flexibility — they apply to EC2, Fargate, and Lambda across any region, instance family, or OS. EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer a steeper discount but lock you to a specific family and region. Reserved Instances still make sense for RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, and Redshift. We model your usage and recommend the right blend of 1-year vs 3-year terms and No Upfront vs Partial vs All Upfront so you maximize discount without overcommitting.

Yes — we audit every account in your AWS Organization, not just the biggest one. Multi-account environments often hide significant savings at the Org level: Savings Plan and Reserved Instance sharing that was never enabled, consolidated billing left misconfigured, missing cost allocation tags, and absent budget or billing alerts. We surface those as part of every audit so you capture the discounts you’ve already paid for.

Yes — we operate exclusively from a read-only IAM role you create and control. We don’t make any changes to your account during the audit. Every API call we make is visible in your CloudTrail. If you later want our help implementing recommendations, that’s a separate, scoped engagement with explicit approvals.

If your AWS account stores or transmits PHI, HIPAA compliance is required. Modern Logic has built HIPAA-aligned AWS architectures with encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, restricted IAM, and Business Associate Agreements with AWS. Our audits flag any configurations that put compliance at risk and recommend remediations alongside the cost-saving findings.

AWS pricing has hundreds of dimensions — instance families, regions, storage classes, data transfer paths, commitment terms, and on-demand vs Spot vs Savings Plan rates. Most teams default to on-demand pricing on right-now-sized resources because it’s the safe choice during a build. The bill grows quietly, and nobody has time to revisit it. An audit is the fastest way to align your spend with what you’re actually using.

AWS publishes the Compute Optimizer, Trusted Advisor, and Cost Explorer Rightsizing recommendations — and they’re a useful starting point. But they don’t understand your architectural constraints, your roadmap, or which workloads can actually be changed. We combine the AWS-native tooling with hands-on review and architectural judgement so the recommendations are realistic, not theoretical.

Modern Logic delivers a written audit report with every finding quantified in estimated monthly and annual savings, ranked by effort. We walk through the report live with your engineering and finance leads, answer questions, and — if you’d like — help implement the changes. The deliverable is something you can hand to leadership and start acting on the same day.

Let’s Talk About Your AWS Bill

Whether you’re a startup watching every dollar, a scale-up whose AWS bill just crossed six figures a month, or an enterprise with sprawl across dozens of accounts — we’ve seen the patterns. Book a call and tell us what your environment looks like. No commitment, no sales pitch. Just a straight conversation about how much you could be saving.