How I Reduced My Cloud Bill by 60% Without Touching My Code

Last year I was paying $340/month for infrastructure that served ~50k monthly active users. Today I pay $136/month for the same load. Here's exactly what I changed — zero code rewrites required. The Problem With "Just Scale It" When your app grows, the instinct is to throw more compute at it. Bigger instances, more replicas, auto-scaling groups. But scaling up is almost never the right first move. The right first move is measuring what you're actually using . Step 1: Audit Your Instance Utilizat