How to prepare for an AWS cost review

Choose a representative billing period and record changes in demand, environments and business activity. Distinguish recurring usage from one-off migration, testing or recovery work. Without that context, a lower bill may reflect lower demand rather than a lasting improvement.

• Accounts, workloads, environments and their accountable owners.
• Billing and usage breakdowns, with existing commitments and discounts identified.
• Resource tags and allocation rules used to attribute spend.
• Availability, performance, recovery and data-handling requirements.
• Planned launches, retirements and other changes likely to affect demand.

For each proposed action, record the owner, implementation cost, dependencies, expected effect and validation period. Separate opportunities identified from changes implemented and savings actually measured.

Illustrative example: scheduling a non-production environment outside working hours may reduce usage, but only if tests and users do not require it then. Confirm the schedule, exception process and restart checks before applying it.