[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.