A FinOps review finds ~$20-23K/yr across a multi-region media platform on AWS

AdvisoryCost-optimization deep divePer-service spend attributionCommitment & RI optimizationRightsizing & instance-family modernizationStorage tiering & lifecycle policiesStanding cost-optimization mechanismManaged billing & resell

~$20–23K/yr

savings quantified across the estate

Top 5

spend drivers mapped — every recommendation tied to a real line

Standing

Compute Optimizer as the ongoing cost mechanism

Amazon CloudFrontAmazon RDSAmazon EC2Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

The customer operates a universal micropayment wallet that lets media owners — publishing, sports, and entertainment brands — monetize content and audience at per-item prices instead of subscriptions. The platform runs multi-region on AWS: Amazon CloudFront delivering the streaming content, an Amazon RDS and EC2 application and data tier, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus with CloudWatch as the observability plane — supported by VeUP as its AWS partner.

The challenge

Micropayments invert the usual media-platform economics: when a view earns cents rather than a subscription, the infrastructure cost of serving each stream is a first-order business quantity — margin lives or dies in the delivery and compute stack. The platform must be multi-region and always available for a global roster of media owners, deliver streaming content with consumer-grade quality, and do it on a cost base disciplined enough that per-item pricing stays viable. That makes cost engineering a permanent property of the architecture, not an annual review.

The solution

VeUP supports the platform’s AWS estate end to end. Amazon CloudFront carries the content-delivery plane across regions, putting the streaming experience close to every audience a media owner brings; the application and data tier runs on Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 under Compute Savings Plans; and observability runs on Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus with Amazon CloudWatch, so platform health and consumption are measured continuously. Onto that estate VeUP delivered the documented cost-optimization review the customer asked for — a per-service spend profile of the live multi-account organization with quantified rightsizing and modernization recommendations across the relational and compute tiers (Graviton-class instance families, commitment coverage, storage-class modernization), and AWS Compute Optimizer installed as the standing rightsizing mechanism, keeping the platform’s unit economics under continuous management rather than periodic rescue.

Production outcomes

KPI	Result
Media platform posture	Multi-region streaming and micropayment platform live on AWS — CloudFront delivery, RDS/EC2 application tier, Prometheus + CloudWatch observability — serving media owners across publishing, sports, and entertainment.
Unit-economics discipline	Documented per-service spend profile with quantified rightsizing, commitment, and storage-modernization recommendations — a mid-single-digit percentage of the estate’s annual run rate identified as addressable savings.
Standing mechanism	AWS Compute Optimizer adopted as the ongoing rightsizing loop — cost engineering institutionalized in the platform’s operations rather than dependent on point-in-time reviews.
Lessons & continuation	For per-item-priced media businesses, FinOps is product strategy: the cheaper each stream is to serve, the more content the model can profitably unlock — so cost telemetry belongs beside audience telemetry in the platform’s core metrics.

AWS services in production

Amazon CloudFront (multi-region content delivery) · Amazon RDS · Amazon EC2 (Compute Savings Plans) · Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus · Amazon CloudWatch · AWS Compute Optimizer