AWS bills have a way of creeping up quietly. Resources provisioned for a project get forgotten, rightsizing gets deprioritized, and before you know it you're paying 40% more than you need to. Here are the highest-impact changes we make for almost every client.
1. Rightsize Your EC2 Instances
Most organizations are running instances 2–3x larger than their actual workloads require. Use AWS Cost Explorer's rightsizing recommendations alongside CloudWatch metrics to identify underutilized instances. Downsizing from m5.2xlarge to m5.large for a lightly loaded application can cut that instance cost by 75%.
2. Use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans
If you're running workloads with predictable usage (most production environments), moving from On-Demand to 1-year Reserved Instances or Compute Savings Plans delivers 30–40% savings with zero architecture changes.
3. Delete or Snapshot Unused Resources
Unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, unused Elastic IPs, and idle load balancers add up fast. Run a monthly hygiene audit and delete anything not tied to an active workload.
4. Move Infrequently-Accessed Data to S3 Glacier
S3 Standard costs roughly $0.023/GB/month. S3 Glacier costs $0.004/GB/month. For backups, archives, and logs older than 90 days, Glacier is a no-brainer. Set up lifecycle policies to automate the transition.
5. Review Data Transfer Costs
Egress charges are often overlooked. Traffic between regions, from EC2 to the internet, and from EC2 to non-VPC services all incur charges. Reviewing your data transfer patterns often reveals architectural improvements that reduce both cost and latency.
Sentiva includes monthly AWS cost audits as part of our cloud management service. Contact us to learn more.