Phi’s Ivaylo Vrabchev, Head of Cloud & leader of our Cloud centre of excellence in Sofia, led a hugely successful practical workshop at AWS Community Day Bulgaria 2025 last Saturday. In this session, he walked the participants through proven strategies for organising, monitoring, and managing cloud resources more effectively.

The workshop covered practical, real-world techniques, including: 

🔹 Using MCP Servers with Amazon Q for cost analysis and optimisation recommendations
🔹 Resource tagging and usage analysis with Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)
🔹 Building insightful dashboards in Amazon QuickSight
🔹 Detecting usage patterns with Amazon CloudWatch
🔹 Automating actions with AWS Lambda and EventBridge Scheduler.

Key Takeaways

Savings vs. Run-Rate Reduction 
With careful financial and operational management, it’s possible to deliver true savings, going beyond simple cost optimisations to achieve spend levels below the original budget baseline. 

Rate and Workload Optimisation: Core FinOps Capabilities 
Rate optimisation focuses on strategic management of commitment discounts: including RIs, Savings Plans, and Committed Use Discounts, supported by strong tracking, analysis, and performance measurement. 
Workload optimisation involves active management of resources: scheduling, cleanup, rightsizing, and re-architecting to improve efficiency and reduce waste. 

ESR and CLR Metrics 
ESR (Effective Savings Rate) and CLR (Commitment Lock-in Risk) are critical to measuring the success of rate optimisation initiatives, providing clear visibility into efficiency gains and commitment performance.

Centralised vs. Decentralised Commitment Strategy
Choosing between a centralised or decentralised approach for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans affects flexibility, accountability, and overall cost efficiency.  Both models have strategic trade-offs depending on organisational maturity.

Designing with Cost in Mind
Architectural decisions should treat cost as a non-functional requirement – ensuring that efficiency, scalability, and cost control are built into design from the start, not added as an afterthought. 

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Want to learn more on related topics?  

For a Cloud Financial Management deep dive, read Yordan Dabov’s White Paper here.  

To learn more about CloudWatch Optimisation read Venelin Lehchanski’s article here.  

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Ivaylo Vrabchev is an experienced leader in Public Cloud Services (AWS), CI/CD, DevSecOps and FinOps.  He is well versed in the complete technology lifecycle from design and implementation to maintenance and enhancement. He is also experienced in leading and growing teams to overcome challenges and to work together to exceed targets.   Ivaylo supports the AWS community in Bulgaria and Europe by sharing knowledge in various locations via blog posts, presentations, speaking at public events and organising workshops and training courses, in 2021 he was recognised by AWS team as one of their worldwide Ambassadors. 

Yordan Dabov , Cloud Managed Services Lead at Phi, brings over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, with expertise spanning on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments. His work is underpinned by extensive FinOps knowledge and a strategic approach to customer relationship management. Yordan has a proven track record of successfully delivering and managing high-quality cloud and on-premises services, consistently driving operational excellence and customer satisfaction. 

Venelin Lechanski, Consultant in Cloud Services at Phi, is a results-driven and focussed IT professional with experience in public cloud – AWS and Azure – together with Microsoft Server, AD, Networking and Virtualization technologies. With almost 20 years of IT professional experience, Venelin brings extensive knowledge in designing, building, supporting and improving hybrid and multi-cloud environments.  

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To learn more about how Phi can help you with your cloud cost optimisation, email sales@phipartners.com.