The problem lands on a Friday afternoon

You open your AWS bill on a Monday and something is off. Not catastrophically off - more like a nagging 15% you can't immediately explain. You know it's probably dev/test waste. You just can't point to it.

Formal FinOps tooling is on the roadmap. In the meantime you have the AWS CLI, Cost Explorer, and about twenty minutes between standups.

This article walks through the exact audit sequence: which queries to run, how to read what you get back, and what to do when the evidence points at a resource that should have stopped days ago.

Why dev/test is where the waste hides