Every business that moves to the cloud eventually faces the same surprise: the bill is bigger than expected. Cloud cost optimisation is the systematic process of identifying and eliminating that waste — and it's one of the highest-ROI engagements we do.
The Client: NordShop
NordShop is a growing e-commerce platform based in Oslo, Norway. They had built their infrastructure organically — adding resources when they needed them, never taking stock of what they were actually using. By the time we engaged, their AWS bill had grown to a point where it was meaningfully impacting their margins.
What We Found
Our audit revealed three categories of waste. First, over-provisioned compute: they were running EC2 instances sized for peak traffic at all times, even at 3am on a Tuesday. Second, storage waste: S3 buckets full of old backups and development assets that hadn't been touched in 18 months. Third, no Reserved Instance coverage: they were paying on-demand pricing for baseline workloads that never changed.
What We Fixed
We implemented auto-scaling groups to match compute to actual demand, moved cold storage to S3 Glacier automatically via lifecycle policies, and purchased Reserved Instances for their stable baseline workload. We also rebuilt their CI/CD pipeline — the old Jenkins setup was taking 45 minutes to deploy; the new GitLab CI pipeline does it in 12.
The Result
Month-over-month AWS spend down 40%. Deployment confidence up — the team ships more frequently because deployments are fast and reliable. And the cost savings funded their next feature sprint.