The Cloud Waste Talk, on Video
Your AWS account is probably wasting 30% of its spend — here's how to find it
We recorded the full GreenOps talk and put it on YouTube. It covers why every AWS account accumulates waste nobody can see, where the money actually goes, and a live look at the free GreenOps Scan CLI finding it — with real numbers from a real account.
What the video covers
- Why you can't see your own waste. An instance sized for a launch that ended months ago. A cache resized for a spike that never came back. None of it looks wrong one resource at a time — industry surveys put the total at 27–32% of cloud spend, account after account.
- Where the money actually goes. The four categories that show up most often on real scans: S3 buckets without lifecycle policies, idle and oversized ElastiCache clusters, oversized EC2/Fargate/RDS compute, and orphaned EBS volumes and snapshots.
- GreenOps Scan in action. How the read-only CLI works, what it can and can't access, why your credentials never leave your machine — and what a real scan's terminal output and PDF report look like.
The part worth skipping to if you're skeptical
The video walks through two scans of the same development account, eight weeks apart. First scan: $7,726/month in billing, 53 findings, $1,176.83 per month in identifiable waste. After the team worked through them: the account's own Cost Explorer graph shows the run-rate dropping to roughly $4,600/month. Same account, same team — the difference was having a concrete list to work from.
Prefer slides?
The full deck from the talk is embedded in its own post, downloadable as a PDF. And if you want to go deeper on any single category, we've written dedicated deep dives on S3 lifecycle policies, orphaned EBS volumes and snapshots, right-sizing EC2 before a Graviton move, and the real account story behind the numbers.
Run it yourself
npx greenops-scan
Free to use, read-only, runs locally — the same tool shown in the video, about a minute end-to-end on a typical account.