Published Paper Details:

As cloud adoption accelerates, optimizing operational costs in platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a critical priority for organizations. This review paper synthesizes current research and practices surrounding cost optimization in AWS, focusing on three key components: EC2/RDS scheduling, AWS Compute Optimizer, and billing analysis. Despite the availability of individual tools and techniques, existing approaches often operate in silos, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. We propose a Unified Cost-Aware Scheduling and Forecasting Model (U-CSFM) that integrates performance telemetry, usage patterns, and cost data to enable predictive, automated, and business-aligned optimization. Through a comparative analysis of the proposed model with existing frameworks, we demonstrate superior performance in cost savings, resource efficiency, and anomaly response times. This review provides actionable insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, while also outlining future directions for cross-cloud interoperability, compliance-aware optimization, and intelligent feedback systems. The findings aim to advance the development of more robust and proactive cost governance strategies in cloud environments.