Using Amazon Q to Unlock Cost Optimization on AWS — Faster
If you’ve been managing AWS costs for any amount of time, you know it’s a moving target. One month your EC2 spend is creeping up, the next it’s data transfer, and by the time you’ve pieced together five Cost Explorer reports, you’re still squinting at a puzzle missing half the pieces.
That’s why I’ve been leaning hard into Amazon Q, which you can even leverage on the Free Tier, to cut through the noise. It’s like having a FinOps analyst that doesn’t sleep — feed it the right prompts, and it’ll serve up exactly the data you need.
The new Cost Explorer Compare feature is great — but prompts take it up a notch
AWS recently rolled out the Cost Explorer Cost Comparison feature. It’s a solid improvement. You can quickly stack up costs across months, spot top accounts or services, and highlight big deltas without cobbling together multiple views.
But here’s the deal — when you’re serious about finding real, actionable optimization opportunities, there’s nothing like throwing a tailored prompt into Amazon Q and getting a laser-focused breakdown.
A real-world example: App tagging saves the day
Here’s one of my go-to prompts that consistently pays off:
Show EC2 costs for past 6 months grouped by appName tag.
List top 5 appName by spend, their month-over-month trends,
top instance types, and reasons for changes.
Also show EC2 costs without appName tag.
A quick callout here:
👉 The appName tag is something we specifically added to each instance — it’s not there by default when you spin up a new EC2. Without it, you’re flying blind trying to figure out which application is burning through your budget.
Why this prompt is a winner:
✅ It puts your biggest spending apps front and center.
✅ Shows cost trends month over month so you immediately spot runaway workloads.
✅ Breaks down the top instance types — super handy to find apps running on oversized machines.
✅ Surfaces untagged spend, which is almost always where money slips through the cracks.
Because cost optimization is a layer cake
At the end of the day, AWS cost optimization is like a layer cake. It’s not one magic switch — it’s about stacking multiple layers of savings: right sizing, shutting down non-prod outside of business hours, moving to reservations, tightening storage policies, exploring autoscaling, and more.
Sure, you could click through 10 different Cost Explorer dashboards and manually build that picture. Or you could run a handful of well-crafted Amazon Q prompts and zero in on where your biggest savings levers are — fast.
More smart prompts to throw at Amazon Q
Here are a few more I’ve been using that might help you squeeze even more out of your budget:
📝 Reservation coverage checks
Show EC2 costs and reservation/SP coverage by appName over past 6 months. Highlight apps with less than 50% coverage.
📝 S3 growth alarms
Show S3 storage costs by bucket over the past 6 months. Highlight any bucket growing more than 20% month-over-month.
📝 Tag hygiene audit
Compare last 3 months' costs by whether appName tag is present vs missing. Highlight total untagged costs.
📝 Anomaly hunt
List services with more than 30% cost increase month-over-month in the last 3 months. Include usage drivers.
If you want, I can even throw together a quick cheat sheet of these prompts so you can drop them straight into Amazon Q. Always happy to help others with recommendations on cloud cost optimization — just reach out.