Most teams run a cost optimization once, save some money, and move on. Nobody owns the follow-up. The findings age. The waste comes back.

We manage tens of thousands of AWS accounts globally as a distributor. Not a handful of large enterprises, but thousands of small and mid-sized businesses. That volume reveals what individual accounts never can: where cloud spend actually drifts, which fixes stick, and which ones quietly fail because nobody was responsible for keeping them alive.

This session maps cost optimization to four pillars and to the people who should own them. Operational hygiene belongs with developers and DevOps: outdated instance generations, unattached resources, right-sizing that never happened. Architecture belongs with architects: Graviton, network cost traps, compute model choices that shape your bill long before anyone looks at it. Commitment strategy belongs with FinOps and procurement: not just EC2. And the ecosystem layer belongs with leadership: what changes when you operate at distributor scale.

Real project examples throughout, savings from 11% to over 70%. What you take home is something you can map onto your own organization tomorrow morning: who owns what, where the biggest levers sit, and why repeatable process beats a one-off cleanup every single time.