EPAM Systems
$1.4M in annual cloud savings without sacrificing reliability
The problem
Cloud spend had grown alongside the platform without a corresponding cost-governance discipline — the usual story of infrastructure that scaled faster than its cost visibility.
- Annual savings
- $1.4M+
- Cost reduction
- 25%
The approach
Introduced per-workload cost visibility with Kubecost, rightsized resources against real usage, and used Azure Cost Management to keep the gains from eroding after the initial cleanup.
Constraints and tradeoffs
An org-wide spending freeze
A freeze buys time, not durable behavior change — the same cost drift returns the moment the freeze lifts.
Commit to reserved instances or savings plans immediately
Committing to reserved capacity before rightsizing just locks in the waste at a discount. Visibility and rightsizing had to come first, or the reservation would have been sized against an inflated baseline.
I'd tie the Kubecost dashboards to a per-team digest from day one instead of a monthly review — the fastest way to keep a cost win from eroding is making it visible to the people generating the spend, not just to the platform team.