Many teams care about cloud costs, but cost optimization often starts too late — after a spike, a budget warning, or a painful bill through unused runtime, oversized resources, and forgotten environments.

In this session, I will share how we approached this challenge with AWS cost-optimization workflow. The idea was simple: help teams find actionable savings opportunities quickly and make cost awareness part of their normal delivery process.

We enhanced an existing aws-cost-review skill, added opening-hours automation for common AWS resources, and integrated the workflow into GitHub Actions. This allows teams to run cost checks directly in their CI/CD flow and receive a clear savings overview in under 30 seconds.

This session will cover:
- Common AWS cost leaks that many teams face
- How opening-hours automation can reduce unnecessary runtime for EC2, RDS/DocDB, and ECS
- How GitHub Actions can bring cost awareness into the developer workflow through quick, actionable savings insights
- Key learnings around configurability, holidays, wake-up behavior, and operational safety
- Real examples of monthly savings, including teams saving up to $500/month

Attendees will leave with practical ideas for making cloud cost optimization visible, repeatable, and easy to adopt — without adding heavy processes or operational overhead.