Kevin Francis, a Platform Engineering Manager at Cambia Health Solutions, describes how his team successfully merged two internal divisions to optimize cloud costs using Datadog’s Cloud Cost Management (CCM) and Resource Catalog. The merger aimed to unify observability, which was fragmented across different platforms, hindering cost reduction and operational awareness. By standardizing on Datadog, the team achieved a comprehensive view of their infrastructure, identifying nearly $30,000 in monthly savings through a refined Reserved Instance (RI) purchasing strategy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). This process involved standardizing the RDS fleet on Graviton-powered db.r6g instances and centralizing RI purchasing, which allowed for greater discount sharing and size flexibility, thereby maximizing cost savings. The initiative also utilized Datadog dashboards for monitoring savings and Resource Catalog for preventing configuration drift, ultimately establishing a repeatable framework for future optimizations in other resources like DynamoDB and OpenSearch.