AWS bills surprise many organizations as usage grows. Understanding cost drivers and applying systematic optimization reduces spending significantly. Effective optimization combines architectural decisions, purchasing strategies, and ongoing monitoring.
Compute Optimization
Right-size instances using AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans reduce costs for predictable workloads. Spot Instances provide dramatic savings for fault-tolerant workloads. Graviton instances offer better price-performance for compatible workloads.
- Review instance utilization regularly—most organizations over-provision
- Use Savings Plans for predictable compute across instance families
- Implement Spot Instances with proper interruption handling for batch workloads
- Consider Graviton processors offering 20-40% better price-performance
- Auto-scale aggressively to match capacity with demand
Storage and Data Transfer
S3 storage classes significantly impact costs—lifecycle policies automate transitions. Data transfer between regions and to internet incurs substantial charges. VPC endpoints reduce NAT Gateway data processing costs. CloudFront caching reduces origin requests and data transfer.