The Episodic Optimization Problem
Most organizations approach cloud cost optimization episodically: a quarterly FinOps review identifies opportunities, an engineering sprint executes some optimizations, costs decrease temporarily, then drift upward again as new workloads are deployed and existing resources grow. The cycle repeats. Episodic optimization never catches up to continuous spending growth because the time between optimization cycles allows waste to accumulate faster than the optimization cycles can remove it. Continuous optimization—where opportunities are identified and addressed as they emerge rather than at quarterly review intervals—requires tooling that makes analysis and action nearly instantaneous.
Trekora's Continuous Optimization Model
Trekora implements continuous optimization through a four-layer model. The Coverage Analysis layer continuously monitors Reserved Instance and Savings Plans coverage, identifying new compute resources that are running on On-Demand pricing and modeling the cost-benefit of purchasing commitments. The Rightsizing Analysis layer monitors CPU, memory, and network utilization patterns for all instances, identifying persistently over-provisioned resources and generating rightsizing recommendations with projected annual savings. The Waste Detection layer identifies idle and orphaned resources: unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, idle NAT gateways, empty load balancers, and snapshots from decommissioned instances. The Architecture Optimization layer analyzes workload patterns to identify opportunities for more cost-efficient service tiers—GP2 to GP3 EBS migration, S3 Intelligent-Tiering for variable-access objects, Aurora Serverless v2 for variable-load databases.
Connecting Analysis to Action
Trekora's value lies not just in identifying optimization opportunities but in making them actionable. Each recommendation includes: projected annual savings (calculated from current spend patterns and resource pricing), implementation complexity assessment (low/medium/high based on operational impact), implementation instructions (step-by-step for simple optimizations, linking to relevant runbooks for complex ones), and risk assessment (what could go wrong and how to mitigate it). High-confidence, low-complexity recommendations—such as GP2-to-GP3 migrations and unattached EBS volume cleanup—can be automated through Trekora's automated remediation integration, enabling no-touch cost reduction for the long tail of small optimizations.