Go Big or Go Home

After many years in FinOps, I still find surprises. Sometimes FinOps can be counterintuitive. Every time I think I've seen it all, another workload reminds me how unpredictable cloud economics can be — and how important it is to understand both the technology and the finance behind it.

Recently, our growing business pushed us to scale up an AWS RDS instance. Data volume had been increasing, we were starting to hit some limits, and our database simply needed to grow. So, we did what felt natural and moved to a larger instance with more memory.

Then came the surprise: our costs dropped.

At first glance, that doesn't make sense. Larger instances should cost more, right? But when we looked closer, the explanation was clear: the upgraded instance came with double the memory, allowing more queries to run in memory instead of hitting disk. This dramatically reduced our storage I/O operations, which had been quietly driving up spend in the background.

By investing in a more capable instance, we reduced the volume of I/O requests, eliminated performance bottlenecks, and actually lowered the total monthly bill. In other words, spending more on compute ended up saving money overall.

This is a classic FinOps moment — where intuition collides with data, and the numbers win.

Cloud cost optimization isn't always intuitive. Sometimes the path to efficiency looks bigger on paper — and sometimes, more really does mean less.

About CloudHiro

CloudHiro is the essential FinOps platform built for multi-cloud reality. Fluent in Azure, AWS, and GCP, CloudHiro delivers deep analytics for over 120 Azure services, the industry's most mature Reserved Instance management solution, and the first cloud billing verification tool.

We unify all your spend — across vendors, tools, and teams — into one intelligent view that connects financial and operational metrics. CloudHiro helps you inform, operate, and optimize with confidence so every cloud dollar drives measurable value.

CloudHiro: FinOps Mastery — to Azure and beyond.