Understand cross-AZ and egress costs, then reduce them
The agent breaks down data transfer by provider, service, account and team, flags jumps and points to the architecture choices behind them.
Runs in
Claude · Slack
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
What drove cross-AZ data transfer last month, by service and team?
Cross-AZ transfer: €7,300 last month, 46% of it between search-api in eu-west-1a and Elasticsearch nodes in 1b/1c. Zone-aware routing for read traffic could remove most of it.
The service team decides on placement, caching or routing changes.
Playbook
What the agent does
From what Costory notices to what you decide. Costory suggests the next step in conversation, and you decide whether to go ahead.
Costory notices
Cross-AZ or egress cost jumps on a service.
Costory investigates
01
Analyze transfer
The network cost template shows cross-AZ, egress and transfer drivers.
02
Attribute
Allocate transfer to teams and services.
03
Correlate
Deploys and traffic metrics explain jumps.
04
Recommend
Claude suggests placement, caching or routing changes.
Where you see it
Claude
You decide
The service team decides on placement, caching or routing changes.
Why it matters
Network costs are the hardest line to explain: they show up on the service that sends the data, not the one that caused it.
Who it’s for
Platform engineers, SREs
Where it runs
Claude · Slack
What you get
What lands in front of your team
An explained network bill
Transfer by driver and owner.
Architecture options
Placement and caching suggestions.
Measurable changes
Track transfer after each change.
Sources and assistants
What it connects
Data sources
Example prompts
Or drive it yourself
Recommend
For the top 3 cross-AZ flows, propose architecture changes and estimate the impact.
FAQ
Questions about this playbook
Does Costory guarantee savings?
No. The agent investigates and recommends with the evidence attached; your team decides what to change. Impact figures are estimates based on your own data.
How long does this playbook take to set up?
Connecting your billing data and the Costory MCP takes under 30 minutes with Terraform or CloudFormation. The playbook itself takes minutes: pick the scope, the trigger and the Slack channel. The first billing data lands the next day, and the agent starts from there.
Can we adjust what the agent does?
Yes. You choose the trigger, the scope (team, service, environment), the channel and the format, and you can pause or change it at any time.
Does Costory change anything in our cloud accounts?
No. Costory reads billing exports and the metrics you connect, and has no write access to your cloud. Actions it takes create Costory objects only: alerts, reports, dashboards and events. Your team stays in control of every change.
Step-by-step guide in the Costory docs
Related playbooks
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A service runs well below its capacity for 30 days.
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Costory notices
A bucket keeps growing in an expensive class with little access.
Storage class and tiering recommendations for S3 and Cloud Storage
Find buckets in expensive storage classes, check access patterns, and get lifecycle and tiering suggestions per owner.
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Costory notices
Spend on a team, service or account deviates from its baseline.
Investigate a cost spike and find the deploy behind it
When spend moves, the agent finds the deploy, team and service behind it, checks incidents and provider events from the same window, and posts the likely cause.
See the playbook
Put this playbook on call
Included in every plan, from €250/month. 30-day free trial: connect in under 30 minutes, get your first optimization recommendation the next day.
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Setup
About 30 minutes
Data residency
EU
Access
Read-only on your cloud