The 7 spicy AWS cost smells we sniff out first

When you stare at cost explorer long enough you develop a nose. Our top seven “smells” include:

1. On-demand compute humming along for 90+ days with no commitments.
2. 24/7 dev clusters with t3.xlarge sizing because “it felt fast”.
3. S3 Infrequent Access buckets with 0 lifecycle policies.
4. NAT gateways that never sleep.
5. Lambda concurrency caps that scream “throttling” on daily graphs.
6. EventBridge rules firing EC2 automation no one remembers owning.
7. Tag drift that makes showback impossible.

Spot three or more and you’ve got smoke. Our agents bring the extinguisher.