AWS Cost Waste: 5 Things I Find in Every Audit

AWS cost waste is money spent on cloud resources that deliver zero value - orphaned volumes, logs stored forever, idle databases, and infrastructure nobody remembers deploying. In most accounts, it adds up to 27-35% of the total bill. # Waste pattern Typical annual cost Fix effort 1 Orphaned EBS volumes $2,000+ per TB 1 Terraform line 2 CloudWatch logs without retention 15% of monthly bill 1 CLI command per log group 3 Unnecessary NAT Gateways $1,166/year per 3-AZ setup Conditional Terraform 4 gp2 volumes instead of gp3 20% of EBS spend In-place migration, zero downtime 5 Over-provisioned RDS $350+/month per idle instance Environment-aware sizing According to a Flexera report, organizations waste 27% of their cloud spending. I have mixed feelings about this. In the audits I've conducted throughout my career, the result has more often been closer to 35%. Never mind the numbers. More important is the fact that almost no one notices wasted money until they actually check it. Interestingly