Cutting AWS costs by up to 50% and building a scalable cloud foundation for growth
Embedded experts
Immediate cost stabilisation
Early optimisation work delivered rapid and measurable savings by addressing inefficient network traffic patterns and improving cost visibility.
Positioned for sustainable cloud efficiency
Beyond immediate cost savings, Footy.com now has a clear path to a more resilient and scalable AWS architecture.
Enabling the next phase of platform evolution
With cost stability achieved and architectural insights in place, Footy.com is now well positioned to unlock further value from its cloud platform.
SITUATION
Overview
Footy.com is a leading sports retail aggregator, connecting millions of customers with the best deals on sportswear and equipment.
As the platform scaled, so did the complexity of its AWS environment. Costs became unpredictable, impacting margin and limiting confidence in scaling the platform. Architectural decisions compounded over time, and operational visibility was limited. With a small engineering team and growing infrastructure demands, Footy.com needed to regain control of spend while building a secure, scalable foundation for future growth.
Leighton partnered with Footy.com to deliver a comprehensive AWS cost optimisation and architecture review, reducing immediate cost pressures and establishing a roadmap for long-term operational excellence.
Solution
The approach
Rapid growth had introduced inefficiencies across Footy’s AWS estate and a sudden spike in NAT Gateway egress traffic exposed deeper architectural and governance gaps. The business needed both immediate remediation and a strategic plan to modernise its platform safely.
Leighton worked closely with Footy.com to deliver both short-term impact and long-term clarity. Leighton’s AWS Practice produced an in-depth report outlining how the customer could better control escalating and unpredictable cloud spend, improve observability and monitoring, and reduce heavy reliance on manual processes.
Immediate cost stabilisation
Through a deep cost optimisation review, we analysed data transfer patterns, network architecture, storage lifecycles, messaging infrastructure and observability gaps to gain a deeper understanding of what was working and what could be improved.
The most significant finding was excessive NAT Gateway data processing charges caused by S3 traffic being routed externally. Introducing an S3 VPC Gateway Endpoint reduced NAT data processing by over 85%, cutting total monthly AWS spend by over 50% (based on prior billing patterns) and eliminating unnecessary external routing, without impacting services.
This single architectural correction transformed cost predictability overnight.
Architectural & governance review
With immediate costs stabilised, the Leighton team broadened the review to examine account structure and blast radius, IAM practices and long-lived credentials, EKS configuration and lifecycle risks, observability and logging coverage, encryption posture, and managed vs self-managed services.
We identified structural limitations that would restrict future scale if left unaddressed, including a single-account model.
Observability & operational excellence
Multi-account governance
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Tech stack
The improved Footy.com platform operates on a modern, cloud-native architecture built primarily on services from Amazon Web Services alongside a small set of open-source technologies. The environment centres around containerised application workloads running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), enabling the platform to scale dynamically as customer demand fluctuates. Supporting infrastructure services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud with Auto Scaling Groups provide flexible compute capacity, while shared storage and persistent workloads are supported through Amazon Elastic File System.
Amazon s3
Amazon CloudFront
AWS WAF
AWS EFS
AWS NAT Gateway
AWS CloudWatch
AWS DynamoDB
Amazon SQS
Amazon SNS
AWS Lambda
Next.js
Amazon EventBridge
AWS Private Link
ALB
AWS IAM Identity Centre
AWS Transfer Family
Cloudfront
E2C
EKS
VPC Flow Logs
IMPACT
Delivering immediate cost savings and a scalable cloud foundation
By addressing architectural inefficiencies and improving visibility across the AWS estate, Footy.com regained control of cloud spend while establishing a stronger technical foundation for future growth. What began as a cost optimisation exercise evolved in
As James Murphy, explained:
“As an organisation we have strong application-level skills, but we lack depth in the ‘ops’ side of AWS, both in terms of managing costs and diagnosing deeper issues. Leighton provided a thorough review of the state of our AWS estate, reducing our bill by at least 30% in the process.”
The work carried out by Leighton is estimated to have reduced Footy.com’s monthly AWS spend by 30-50% and NAT data processing charges have been reduced by 85%.
Immediate cost stabilisation
Early optimisation work delivered rapid and measurable savings by addressing inefficient network traffic patterns and improving cost visibility.
Positioned for sustainable cloud efficiency
Beyond immediate cost savings, Footy.com now has a clear path to a more resilient and scalable AWS architecture.
Enabling the next phase of platform evolution
With cost stability achieved and architectural insights in place, Footy.com is now well positioned to unlock further value from its cloud platform.
Event-driven architecture
Adopting an event-driven approach using AWS services will reduce unnecessary compute load, improve responsiveness, and lower operational costs.
Modern front-end performance optimisation
Leveraging capabilities within Next.js such as Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) will help optimise static content delivery, enabling faster page loads, lower build costs, improved SEO performance, and quicker content updates without full application rebuilds.
Continuous well-architected improvement
Embedding ongoing reviews aligned to the AWS Well-Architected Framework ensures the platform continues to evolve in line with best practices.
A platform ready for future growth
By combining immediate cost optimisation with strategic architectural guidance, Footy.com now has the clarity and confidence needed to scale its platform sustainably.
Embedded experts
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