The Organization:

LibChalk is a mission-driven web hosting service delivering modern, scalable infrastructure for librarymanagement systems serving hundreds of libraries across the United States. Their cloud-hostedplatform powers critical library operations including integrated library systems, catalog management,patron services, digital collections, and community engagement tools. Operating as a low-cost, non-profit service for library institutions, LibChalk must balance strict cost discipline with enterprise-gradereliability, security, and operational excellence.

The organization has invested strategically in AWS infrastructure to support their multi-tenant platformarchitecture, enabling libraries of all sizes to access advanced technology capabilities previouslyavailable only to large, well-funded institutions. As their customer base grew and libraries increasinglyrequired transparent cost accountability and regulatory compliance capabilities, LibChalk recognizedthe need to modernize their cloud financial management, governance practices, and operationalvisibility to meet these expectations while maintaining their commitment to affordability.

The Challenge: Fast Growth and Scalability in a Highly-Regulated Industry 

LibChalk’s AWS environment was operational and serving library customers effectively, but as theorganization scaled, several opportunities emerged to evolve their financial management andgovernance capabilities to align with modern AWS best practices and support continued growth.

Cost Visibility and Financial Governance Evolution

LibChalk had established foundational cloud financial management processes but identifiedopportunities to advance these capabilities to meet the demands of a growing, multi-tenant operation.Their existing cost tracking provided basic monthly spending visibility, but lacked the granular, real-time insights needed to proactively manage budget variance, identify anomalous spending patterns, oraccurately allocate costs across individual library tenants for transparent chargeback.

Without automated cost anomaly detection, unexpected spending increases could go unnoticed fordays or weeks, potentially impacting monthly budgets and eroding the cost predictability essential totheir non-profit mission. The absence of trend-based budget variance alerts meant the finance teamrelied on manual monthly reviews rather than proactive, automated notifications when spendingpatterns deviated from established baselines.

Limited resource tagging consistency across environments made it challenging to answer criticalbusiness questions: What is the true cost-per-library-customer? Which services drive the highestinfrastructure costs? Where are the greatest opportunities for optimization? How should costs be fairlyallocated across tenant libraries with varying usage profiles?

Business Impact: Reactive rather than proactive cost management, limited ability to providetransparent cost breakdowns to library customers, difficulty forecasting infrastructure costs forbusiness planning, missed opportunities to identify and remediate wasteful spending, and challengesdemonstrating cost efficiency to stakeholders and funding organizations.

Optimization and Utilization Insights

While LibChalk’s infrastructure served customer workloads reliably, the organization lackedsystematic, data-driven insights into resource utilization patterns and optimization opportunities.Without AWS Cost Optimizer actively analyzing their compute fleet, EC2 instances, databaseconfigurations, and storage tiers, the team had limited visibility into right-sizing opportunities,underutilized resources, or more cost-effective purchasing options like Savings Plans and ReservedInstances.

The absence of comprehensive Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) with detailed service-levelbreakdowns limited the team’s ability to identify specific cost drivers, analyze usage patterns overtime, or perform detailed what-if scenarios for architectural changes. Without CUDOS dashboardsproviding visual analytics, stakeholders lacked intuitive, executive-friendly visualizations of spendingtrends, cost allocation, and optimization progress.

Business Impact: Potential overspending on oversized resources, missed opportunities forcommitment-based discounts, limited visibility into whether infrastructure investments aligned withactual workload requirements, difficulty demonstrating cost optimization efforts to board members andlibrary customers, and challenges planning capacity expansion based on historical usage patterns.
Cost Visibility and Financial Governance Evolution

Monitoring and Alerting Maturity

LibChalk’s monitoring capabilities provided basic infrastructure health visibility but opportunitiesexisted to advance their real-time alerting and proactive budget management. The absence of AWSBudget actions tied to spending thresholds meant finance teams discovered budget overruns duringmonthly reviews rather than receiving immediate notifications when costs exceeded definedthresholds.

Without Cost Anomaly Detection leveraging machine learning to identify unusual spending patterns,sudden cost increases from resource misconfigurations, unintended auto-scaling events, oroperational errors could persist unnoticed. The team lacked 90-day trend variance alerts that wouldenable early warning when spending trajectory deviated from established baselines.

Business Impact: Delayed response to cost anomalies, reactive rather than predictive budgetmanagement, limited ability to intervene before spending significantly exceeded budget allocations,challenges meeting strict cost targets essential to non-profit mission, and difficulty explaining costvariances to stakeholders after-the-fact.

Strategic Planning for Multi-Tenant Financial Clarity

As LibChalk’s customer base expanded, the need for advanced cost allocation mechanisms becameincreasingly critical. The organization needed a comprehensive tagging strategy with standardized,enforced tags across all resources to enable accurate per-tenant cost attribution. Without CostCategories organized hierarchically by customer, environment, application, and workload type,financial reporting remained aggregated at the account level.

Libraries increasingly requested detailed cost breakdowns showing exactly what infrastructure coststheir workloads generated—information essential for their own budget planning and grant applications.

Business Impact: Inability to provide transparent, detailed cost attribution to library customers,challenges implementing fair, usage-based pricing models, difficulty forecasting costs for customeronboarding, and limited visibility into which customer segments drive profitability.

The Solution:

LibChalk partnered with Evolve Consulting (Rego Consulting AWS Practice), an AWS Advanced TierServices Partner specializing in cloud financial management, governance, and operations excellencefor mission-driven organizations. The engagement followed a structured methodology encompassingdiscovery through automated Well-Architected Framework Review, prioritized roadmap development,rapid implementation of high-value financial management capabilities, and strategic planning foradvanced cost allocation.

Discovery and Automated Well-Architected Framework Review

The engagement began with a comprehensive Automated AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviewutilizing 6pillars.ai. This automated approach enabled rapid, comprehensive evaluation across all sixWell-Architected pillars with objective, data-driven findings based on actual resource configurations.

The automated WAFR systematically evaluated LibChalk’s AWS environment against 300+ bestpractice checks, analyzing IAM configurations, network architectures, data protection controls,monitoring coverage, cost management practices, and operational procedures. The assessmentidentified 19 high-risk items requiring prioritized attention and 25 medium-risk items suitable forplanned improvement.

Based on WAFR findings, Evolve developed a prioritized remediation roadmap: (1) Immediatedeployment of core financial management tools, (2) Strategic design for advanced cost tagging andcategorization, (3) Ongoing optimization cycles based on insights from newly deployed tools.

Business Value: Objective, comprehensive baseline assessment completed in hours rather thanweeks, identified specific high-impact improvements aligned to AWS best practices, created clearprioritization based on risk and business impact, and established measurable metrics to trackprogress.

Phase 1: Rapid Deployment of Core Financial Management Capabilities

Following roadmap validation with LibChalk leadership, the teams executed rapid deployment of fivecore financial management capabilities designed to provide immediate visibility, alerting, andoptimization insights.

AWS Cost and Utilization Service Implementation

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) service was verified as operational and updated with thelatest AWS features and data granularity options. CUR provides comprehensive, granular cost andusage data at the hourly level, including detailed breakdowns by service, resource, operation,availability zone, and pricing dimension.

Business Value: Establishes the foundational data layer for all cost management activities. Granularusage data enables detailed analysis of cost drivers, supports accurate chargeback calculations,provides evidence for optimization decisions, and creates an audit trail for financial compliance.

Technical Implementation:

• S3 bucket configured with lifecycle policies to archive older reports to S3 Glacier
• IAM policies restrict CUR data access to authorized finance and operations personnel
• Daily report generation ensures cost data remains current
• Integration with QuickSight prepared for CUDOS dashboard deployment

Cost Anomaly Detection with Automated Alerting

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection was deployed with machine learning models continuously analyzingspending patterns to identify unusual cost increases or unexpected usage. The service automaticallyestablishes baseline spending patterns for each AWS service, account, and cost category.

Anomaly detection was configured with custom monitors for service-level monitoring, linked accountmonitoring, and future cost category monitoring. Alert thresholds were configured based on LibChalk’sspecific requirements with low, medium, and high sensitivity detection.

Alerts integrate with Amazon SNS topics routing notifications to email, Slack, and PagerDuty for after-hours critical anomalies.

Business Value: Transforms cost management from reactive monthly reviews to proactive real-timemonitoring. Enables teams to identify and remediate unexpected cost increases within hours ratherthan weeks, preventing small issues from compounding into significant budget impacts.

Technical Implementation:

• Anomaly detection monitors activated across all AWS accounts
• SNS topic configured with subscription filter policies
• Runbooks created for common anomaly types
• Cost Anomaly Detection dashboard created in CloudWatch

AWS Budgets with 90-Day Trend Variance Alerts

AWS Budgets was implemented with comprehensive budget monitoring covering monthly spendinglimits, forecasted variance alerts, and trend-based notifications. Unlike simple threshold-based alerts,trend variance alerts enable proactive notification when spending trajectory indicates future budgetoverruns.

Budget configurations include monthly cost budgets, service-level budgets, forecasted budgets, and90-day trend variance alerts comparing current spending trajectory to rolling averages.

Business Value: Provides multi-layered financial guardrails ensuring costs remain within plannedallocations. Forecasting capabilities enable proactive intervention before costs significantly exceedbudgets. Trend variance detection identifies sustained changes in spending patterns.

Technical Implementation:

• Budgets created using Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation)
• SNS topics for budget alerts configured with IAM policies
• Custom CloudWatch dashboard visualizing budget utilization
• Integration prepared for future ticketing system automation

AWS Cost Optimizer Activation

AWS Compute Optimizer was activated to provide automated, data-driven recommendations foroptimizing EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes, and Lambda functions. ComputeOptimizer analyzes configuration and CloudWatch utilization metrics over 14-day periods.
Business Value: Transforms optimization from sporadic, manual reviews to continuous, automatedidentification of savings opportunities. Data-driven recommendations remove guesswork from right-sizing decisions and provide quantified cost impact estimates.

Technical Implementation:

• Compute Optimizer service-linked role created
• CloudWatch Agent deployed to EC2 instances for enhanced metrics
• Custom dashboard visualizing optimization opportunities
• Integration with change management process

CUDOS Dashboards for Actionable Analytics

The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CUDOS) were deployed using AWS-maintained QuickSighttemplates, providing comprehensive visual analytics for financial stakeholders. These dashboardstransform raw CUR data into intuitive visualizations.

Dashboards include Cost Overview, Cost Intelligence, Compute Instance, S3, and Data Transferdashboards, customized for LibChalk with environment filtering and cost allocation capabilities.

Business Value: Democratizes cost visibility beyond finance teams to operations, development, andexecutive leadership. Visual dashboards enable stakeholders without deep AWS expertise tounderstand cost drivers and participate in optimization discussions.

Technical Implementation:

• QuickSight Standard edition deployed with SPICE
• Athena database configured to query CUR data
• IAM policies configure role-based access
• Automated daily data refresh

Phase 2: Strategic Planning for Advanced Cost Allocation

Following successful deployment of core tools, the teams began strategic design and requirementsgathering for advanced cost tagging and categorization.

Comprehensive Tagging Strategy Design

A comprehensive resource tagging schema was defined with required tags including Environment,Application, Customer, CostCenter, Owner, DataClassification, and BackupPolicy. Tag enforcementwill be implemented through AWS Config Rules, Service Control Policies, automated remediation, andCI/CD integration.

Cost Categories Framework

AWS Cost Categories were designed providing hierarchical cost organization with CustomerSegments, Service Tiers, and Cost Types categories using rules-based logic.
Business Value: Cost Categories enable sophisticated financial analysis not possible with flat taggingalone. Hierarchical organization supports complex queries and automatically updates as resources change.

The Results:

The cloud financial management optimization engagement delivered measurable, immediate businessvalue across cost visibility, operational efficiency, and strategic financial planning capabilities.

Financial Visibility and Control

Operational Maturity and Efficiency

Strategic Business Enablement

Key Recommendations for Similar Organizations

Conclusion

LibChalk’s cloud financial management optimization demonstrates how mission-driven organizationscan achieve enterprise-grade cost visibility, proactive management, and strategic financial planningwhile maintaining focus on affordability and operational excellence. By deploying AWS Cost AnomalyDetection, AWS Budgets with trend variance alerts, AWS Cost Optimizer, and CUDOS dashboards—guided by findings from automated WAFR—LibChalk transformed financial management from reactivemonthly analysis to proactive real-time optimization.

The partnership with Evolve Consulting (Rego AWS Practice) provided not just technologyimplementation but methodology, best practices, and knowledge transfer ensuring LibChalk’s teamcan independently sustain and continuously improve their cost management practices.

About Evolve Consulting (Rego AWS Practice)

Evolve Consulting is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specializing in cloud governance,financial management, and operations excellence for mission-driven organizations including non-profits, education institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies. Through evidence-based methodology combining automated Well-Architected Framework Reviews, hands-onimplementation, and comprehensive knowledge transfer, Evolve enables organizations to achievesecure, compliant, cost-efficient AWS operations that scale with their missions.

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