Building an Autonomous FinOps Agent: My Experiment in Automating Cloud Cost Optimization

How I Built an Intelligent Python Agent to Detect and Eliminate Cloud Waste in Real-Time How I Built an Intelligent Python Agent to Detect and Eliminate Cloud Waste in Real-Time TL;DR In this extensive engineering log, I document my journey building an Autonomous FinOps Agent from scratch using Python. Faced with the ubiquitous problem of "cloud waste"—idle EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, and ancient RDS snapshots—I decided to build a self-driving bot to tackle the issue. By simulating a realistic AWS environment, I developed an agent that: Discovers infrastructure resources autonomously using a mock Boto3 layer. Analyzes usage metrics patterns to identify "zombies" (idle resources). Executes remediation actions like stopping instances or deleting unattached volumes. Reports potential savings in real-time using a terminal dashboard. This article covers the entire SDLC: from the initial "napkin design" architecture, through the deep-dive implementation of the detection logic, to