AWS S3 Cost Optimization: The Complete Savings Playbook
S3 is the most used service on AWS and, for many organizations, the single largest line item on the bill after compute. The insidious thing about S3 costs is that they creep. Nobody notices when a bucket grows from 10 TB to 50 TB over six months because the data is "just sitting there." Then the bill arrives and the storage line has tripled. I have audited AWS accounts where S3 spending dropped 60-70% after a week of lifecycle policies, storage class changes, and cleaning up forgotten multipart uploads. The savings were always there. Nobody had looked.