My first consulting job happened a few years ago, and at that time I didn’t even realize that it was actually part of consulting or work in general, because I didn’t experience it that way.
I was actually helping friends who run a small company to deal with the chaos of AWS. The original request was something completely different and unrelated to cost optimization it was about issues they were having with their microservice infrastructure. After I helped them with that initial request and after we resolved all the problems and established stable operation of the application and infrastructure, I decided with their approval to “look around” a bit, because I was interested in how everything was set up, where things were located, and what their design decisions were.
A Walk Through the Infrastructure
After a short time spent exploring AWS, I noticed quite a few EC2 instances and EBS volumes. At first glance nothing seemed concerning, but when I stopped and thought about it more carefully, taking into account the microservice infrastructure mentioned earlier, plus RDS and other components, I couldn’t help but ask myself two questions:
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Why does a small company have so many provisioned resources?
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What does their AWS bill look like?
The AWS Bill That Raised Questions
I’ll start with the bill. Their monthly cost at the time, if my memory still serves me well, was somewhere between $5–7k, which seemed absurd to me because I believed they were overpaying for what they were using AWS for and by a lot.
This fit perfectly with my second question - Why they had so many provisioned resources ?
It turned out that this was indeed one of the problems. A lot of resources were actually not being used: various staging and test environments had been spun up, test EC2 instances were overprovisioned, cleanup was rarely done, and there were dangling EBS volumes, some of them several hundred GB in size. On top of that, there were non-optimized queries running on Serverless RDS that was constantly scaling, plus many other small issues that I managed to find just by walking through the infrastructure.
From a Favor to a Turning Point
Of course, I documented all of this and sent it to them so they could optimize it. They reacted efficiently and in a timely manner and managed to cut their monthly costs in half in a short period of time.
At the time, I didn’t consider this as a consulting job. I was just curious and wanted to help as a friend. But today, looking back at it, I see that this was actually the beginning of something that would later turn into a passion.