Engineering case study

Airtasker

Cloud cost engineering in the delivery pipeline.

AWS Cloud SecurityWell Architected

The challenge

AWS spend was growing without clear ownership or a consistent cost-per-transaction measure.

The engineering

A cost and reliability review, followed by Terraform changes for sizing, schedules, storage and logs.

The result

Cost changes delivered through the existing pipeline, with a cost-per-transaction measure for finance.

Read the full project story ↓

Client: Airtasker
Industry: Online Marketplace
Location: Sydney, Australia

About project

AWS Cloud Security

Well Architected

AWS

Airtasker is Australia's largest online services marketplace, connecting 4M+ users with local service providers. tMinus1 ran a structured cost review and rightsizing engagement across their AWS estate.

The situation

AWS spend had grown 35% year-on-year while the business had grown 18%. No team owned cloud cost as a discipline, and the Well-Architected cost pillar had never been formally reviewed. Non-production environments ran at production sizing overnight and on weekends.

What we built

A Well-Architected Review against the cost and reliability pillars identified $340K in annual recoverable spend across five categories: oversized RDS instances, non-production environment scheduling, orphaned EBS volumes and snapshots, cross-AZ data transfer, and uncompressed CloudWatch log groups with indefinite retention. Remediation was delivered as Terraform changes into the existing pipeline.

How we delivered it

Cost pillar review and inventory (week 1), remediation Terraform build (weeks 2–3), deployment and validation (week 4).

The result

$340K annual cost reduction delivered in four weeks of engineering. 99.98% uptime maintained through the changes. Cost-per-transaction metric established for the first time, giving finance a reliable growth model.