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How We Reduced Client AWS Cloud Costs by 42% Using Terraform & Spot Instances

Alex Morgan
Alex Morgan CTO & Principal Architect • July 5, 2026 • 5 min read
Cloud Cost Optimization

Unoptimized Kubernetes pod request specs and idle non-production environments waste tens of thousands of dollars monthly. Here is our exact FinOps playbook for slashing AWS bills by 42%.

1. Leveraging AWS Graviton3 Processors

Migrating EKS node pools from x86 instance types (e.g. m5.xlarge) to ARM64 Graviton instances (e.g. m7g.xlarge) yields up to 40% better price-performance with zero code changes for Node.js, Go, and Python runtimes.

2. Karpenter & AWS Spot Instance Pools

Replace legacy Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter for fast node provisioning. By mixing AWS Spot Instances across multiple instance types in non-critical workloads, node costs are cut by up to 70%.

FinOps Impact Summary

By rightsizing CPU requests, migrating to Graviton3, and shutting down staging environments outside business hours, our clients save an average of $18,000 monthly.

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