A client came to me with an AWS bill of over $2,000/month for a single NOP deployment and asked if I could help reduce it.

At first glance, the system was sluggish despite running on large instances. After a deep analysis, I discovered the real bottleneck: thousands of images stored in RDS instead of a more efficient solution.

I redesigned the setup by moving the images to Amazon S3, optimized the code to lower resource demands, and eliminated redundant instances. To maintain resilience, I implemented a proper backup and disaster recovery strategy.

The results? The monthly bill dropped from $2,000+ to under $1,000, while performance actually improved.