LambdaClean

“LambdaClean: Your serverless watchdog for AWS cost savings.”

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Inspiration

Cloud bills often surprise engineering teams—not because they're growing too fast, but because they forget what's been left behind. Idle EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, and unused security groups often go unnoticed, quietly burning money.

We built LambdaClean to give teams an automated way to detect, prioritize, and clean up these hidden costs using fully serverless infrastructure.

What It Does

LambdaClean is a serverless FinOps assistant that:

  • 🧠 Scans your AWS environment for idle, underused, or orphaned resources
  • 💸 Calculates cost savings using the AWS Cost Explorer API
  • ⚠️ Notifies teams of high-priority cleanup opportunities
  • 🧹 Automates cleanup actions via API or dashboard interface
  • 📊 Visualizes savings in a clean, responsive dashboard

How We Built It

  • AWS Lambda: Powers all automation—scanning, alerting, cleanup, and API
  • DynamoDB: Stores discovered resources and their risk/cost levels
  • EventBridge: Triggers daily scans with cron-based schedules
  • API Gateway: Hosts endpoints for the dashboard and manual actions
  • S3 + CloudFront: Hosts a responsive frontend dashboard
  • SNS: Delivers optional alerts to email or Slack
  • Cost Explorer API: Estimates monthly cost impact of unused resources

We used the AWS SAM CLI to deploy the infrastructure and followed the principle of "pay-per-use" at every layer.

Challenges We Ran Into

  • Cost Explorer API requires special billing permission—had to adapt to fallback logic during testing
  • Ensuring least-privilege IAM policies while enabling resource listing across EC2, RDS, and EBS
  • Avoiding false positives when flagging resources (e.g., test environments vs. real waste)
  • Designing a frontend that works both with real-time API data and static demo content

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

  • Built a fully working Lambda-powered cloud audit pipeline with notifications and live dashboards
  • Identified potential savings of over $90 during initial test scans on our own AWS sandbox
  • Implemented safe cleanup logic that only deletes resources after user confirmation
  • Created a lightweight, zero-maintenance FinOps tool that scales with your AWS account

What We Learned

  • How to integrate multiple AWS services in a secure, scalable serverless architecture
  • Practical FinOps strategies from real-world AWS billing challenges
  • How to use EventBridge, DynamoDB Streams, and Cost Explorer together
  • The power of infrastructure-as-code via AWS SAM and the importance of logging & observability

What's Next

  • Add multi-account support for organizations with AWS Organizations
  • Support tagging compliance checks and resource tagging automation
  • Add integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams for alerting
  • Publish as an open-source CLI or web app for public use

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