Case study · Fractional Platform Lead
Right-sizing cloud spend without a migration.
Six months of fractional leadership: usage-based autoscaling, committed-use plans, and cleanup.
The challenge
Cloud spend had crept up quietly for two years, and the instinctive fix on the table was a full migration to a cheaper platform — expensive, risky, and mostly a distraction from the actual problem.
Nobody had time to look closely at what was actually running, because nobody senior enough owned infrastructure full-time.
What we did
Spent the first three weeks just measuring before touching anything.
- Found the orphans. Unattached volumes, forgotten staging clusters, and load balancers with no live traffic — cut in week one with zero risk.
- Moved steady-state workloads to committed-use plans. Anything with predictable baseline load came off on-demand pricing.
- Right-sized instead of migrated. Most services were simply over-provisioned for load that had never materialized; resizing beat rearchitecting almost every time.
- Added usage-based autoscaling. So the savings held after the engagement ended, instead of drifting back up over the next two years.
The result
Cloud spend dropped 38% within the first quarter, with the majority of savings landing before any architecture changed at all. No migration, no downtime, and a cost posture the team could maintain on their own once the six months were up.