[burritosnob]

I run a small consulting practice and we have pivoted almost exclusively to helping customers reduce cloud spend. Across 100+ engagements, with cloud spend raging from $500k-$40M per year, I can confidently state the following:

>90% of companies are overspending on cloud resources. On average, 30-40% depending on provider (AWS is typically the worst).

>75% of IT/Engineering teams have overbuilt their environments to leverage the latest & greatest tech stacks / toolsets with no justifiable business need.

>50% will confidently state they have “optimized” their environment and in almost every case there is money being left on the table. We have only engaged with one customer that we couldn’t offer savings. They spend $30M+ per year on AWS and had a full time staff of 3 engineers solely focused on cost optimization.

>50% of IT / Engineering leaders became incredibly defensive when presented with savings analysis which almost always included reduction in technical complexity of stack. We have since pivoted and marketing/engaging almost exclusively to CEO/CFO as first contact.

>50% of companies had one of more cloud costing/monitoring tools in place that was not being leveraged, or worse, gamed to produce inaccurate reports.

[jiggawatts]

I can confirm having had a similar experience, albeit at a smaller scale (fewer customers but similar annual spend.)

My favourite find was a database backup someone configured where it was keeping full uncompressed daily backups forever. Fixing just that cut their spend by $100K annually, and then we kept going.

The worst offenders are governments, especially in some countries that haven't had sufficiently brutal economic downturns recently to force anyone to do some belt tightening. Australian government is spectacularly wasteful, burning piles of money in the cloud for services that only malicious bots ever visit.

Like you said, these places love to pad out there resumes at the expense of the taxpayer. I regularly see multiple Kubernetes clusters deployed for one web app. Or architecture diagrams that look like a spiderweb of connecte d systems for something that should be running on a single VM.

[arrmn]

This sounds really interesting, I'm not a prospect but want to learn more about it. Can I get in touch with you somehow?

[silisili]

Man, working with you for just even one year would be extremely cathartic. Keep on keeping on...