AWS bills have a way of creeping up. Resources spun up for a project get forgotten, rightsizing gets pushed back, and before long you're paying 40% more than you need to. Here are the changes that make the biggest difference for almost every client.
1. Rightsize your EC2 instances
Most organizations run instances 2 to 3 times bigger than their workloads need. Use the rightsizing recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer alongside CloudWatch metrics to find underused instances. Dropping a lightly loaded application from m5.2xlarge to m5.large can cut that instance's cost by 75%.
2. Use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans
If your usage is predictable (true of most production environments), moving from On-Demand to 1-year Reserved Instances or Compute Savings Plans saves 30 to 40% with no changes to your architecture.
3. Delete or snapshot unused resources
Unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, unused Elastic IPs and idle load balancers add up fast. Do a cleanup every month and delete anything that isn't tied to an active workload.
4. Move rarely used data to S3 Glacier
S3 Standard costs roughly $0.023 per GB per month. S3 Glacier costs $0.004. For backups, archives and logs older than 90 days, Glacier is an easy call. Set up lifecycle policies so the move happens automatically.
5. Review data transfer costs
Egress charges are easy to miss. Traffic between regions, from EC2 to the internet and from EC2 to services outside your VPC all cost money. Looking at how your data moves often points to architecture changes that lower both cost and latency.
Monthly AWS cost audits are part of our cloud management service. Contact us to learn more.