# AWS Monthly Cost Optimization Checklist

Use this checklist during monthly FinOps reviews.

## Billing Baseline
- Export the previous full month by linked account, service, region, and tag.
- Compare month-over-month change by absolute dollars and percentage.
- Identify the top 10 services and top 10 accounts by spend.
- Mark any service with more than 15% month-over-month growth.

## Commitment Coverage
- Review Savings Plans and Reserved Instance utilization.
- Keep commitments tied to stable baseline usage, not peak usage.
- Separate production baseline from development and seasonal workloads.
- Record renewal dates and exchange windows.

## Storage
- Review S3 buckets without lifecycle policies.
- Identify Standard storage older than 30, 90, and 180 days.
- Check incomplete multipart uploads.
- Validate backup retention against business requirements.

## Network and CDN
- Review NAT Gateway, inter-region transfer, and internet egress.
- Check CloudFront cache hit ratio and origin transfer.
- Confirm logs are retained only as long as needed.

## Governance
- Confirm required cost allocation tags are active.
- Check untagged spend by account and service.
- Review budget alerts and anomaly detection recipients.
- Assign an owner and due date for every optimization action.