Cloud expenditure optimization for cost efficiency | by Coupang Engineering | Coupang Engineering Blog | Medium (opens in new tab)

Coupang addressed rising cloud costs by establishing a cross-functional Central team to bridge the gap between engineering usage and financial accountability. Through a data-driven approach involving custom analytics and automated resource management, the company successfully reduced on-demand expenditure by millions of dollars. This initiative demonstrates that aligning technical infrastructure with financial governance is essential for maintaining growth without unnecessary waste.

The Central Team and Data-Driven Governance

• Coupang formed a specialized Central team consisting of infrastructure engineers and technical program managers to identify efficiency opportunities across the organization.
• The team developed custom BI dashboards utilizing Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), and Amazon Athena to provide domain teams with actionable insights into their spending.
• The finance department partnered with engineering to enforce strict budget compliance, ensuring that domain teams managed their resources within assigned monthly and quarterly limits.

Strategies for Spending and Paying Less

• The company implemented "Spending Less" strategies by automating the launch of resources in non-production environments only when needed, resulting in a 25% cost reduction for those areas.
• "Paying Less" initiatives focused on rightsizing, where the Central team worked with domain owners to manually identify and eliminate unutilized or underutilized EC2 resources.
• Workloads were migrated to more efficient hardware and pricing models, specifically leveraging ARM-based AWS Graviton processors and AWS Spot Instances for data processing and storage.

Targeted Infrastructure Optimization

• Engineering teams focused on instance generation alignment, ensuring that services were running on the most cost-effective hardware generations available.
• Storage costs were reduced by optimizing Amazon S3 structures at rest, improving how data is organized and stored.
• The team refined Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) configurations to enhance processing efficiency, significantly lowering the cost of large-scale data analysis.

To achieve sustainable cloud efficiency, engineering organizations should move beyond viewing cloud costs as a purely financial concern and instead treat resource management as a core technical metric. By integrating financial accountability directly into the engineering workflow through shared analytics and automated resource controls, companies can foster a culture of efficiency that supports long-term scalability.