Digital publishing · AWS
A consumer publishing platform, delivered through a digital agency
Cloudreason inherited an AWS estate running a major consumer publishing platform, engaged through the digital agency that owns the client relationship, with a twenty-minute handover and no documentation. The estate was costing four times what it needed to, and nobody could say with confidence what all of it did.
The problem
Inherited estates are where cloud waste goes to hide. Every environment accumulates the decisions of everyone who has ever worked on it: the proof-of-concept that became production, the appliance bought to satisfy a long-departed security policy, the oversized instances specified for a launch-day peak that never recurred. When the people who made those decisions leave, and in agency-delivered work teams change often, the context leaves with them.
What remains is infrastructure that runs on institutional fear. Nobody knows whether the firewall appliance is load-bearing, so it stays. Nobody is sure what breaks if the old environment is switched off, so it stays. Each component is individually cheap enough to ignore and collectively expensive enough to matter, and the rational move for any individual engineer is always to leave it alone: the person who switches something off owns the outage, while the cost of leaving it running is spread across everyone and noticed by no one. Industry surveys putting typical cloud waste near 30% are, in large part, measuring exactly this.
What we did
The first phase was archaeology. We rebuilt our understanding of the estate from the ground up: mapping every component, tracing how traffic actually flowed rather than how it was assumed to flow, and establishing which parts were load-bearing and which were simply still running because switching things off felt riskier than paying for them. That work turned unknowns into decisions, and decisions can be owned.
Then we re-architected. Unnecessary components were removed outright, including firewall appliances that added cost and complexity the platform’s actual traffic patterns didn’t justify; AWS-native controls covered the genuine requirement. What remained was right-sized against the platform’s real load rather than its historical worst case.
Only then did we introduce commitment-based pricing. The sequencing is deliberate and it matters: reservations bought against a bloated estate lock the bloat in for the term of the commitment. Strip and resize first, then commit to what has earned its place. That way the discount compounds the optimisation instead of freezing the waste.
The results
Monthly spend now runs at a quarter of what it was, a 75% reduction, and the saving has been sustained over several years rather than clawed back by drift. The agency’s client gets the same platform, faster to reason about and dramatically cheaper to run; the agency gets an infrastructure partner who can take an undocumented estate off its hands and hand back a documented, governed one.
Most consultancies can find waste. The differentiator on inherited estates is the willingness to take responsibility for removing it: being the party who says “this can go”, and then making it go, safely.
What made it work
Willingness to remove things. Much of what sits in an inherited estate is there because nobody has been willing to take responsibility for switching it off.
Why this client isn't named
This is a real engagement with real numbers. We don't name clients on our website because we'd rather they weren't fielding sales calls for appearing here. If you'd like more detail, ask us and, where the client is happy, we'll arrange a direct conversation or reference.